Otto Dickel

Johann Otto Eduard Dickel (* 5. June 1880 in Darmstadt ; † 15. June 1944 in Undingen ) was a German teacher and folkish agitator . As an early member of the DAP or NSDAP , he came into competition with Adolf Hitler and was expelled from the party in 1921.

Life

Otto Dickel was born in Darmstadt in 1880 as the son of the teacher and beekeeper Ferdinand Dickel . After studying natural sciences, he came to Munich and traveled for study purposes a. a. to China and India .

Through his father he came into contact with beekeeping and wrote several papers about it. Dickel studied at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and received his doctorate in 1904 with the dissertation " Developmental studies on the bee egg ".

In the summer of 1909 he accepted a position at the Royal Realgymnasium Augsburg as a "certified teacher training candidate" . There he was to teach gymnastics for the entire school, initially as an assistant, and later as a gymnastics teacher. In 1914 he entered the First World War . However , he was only able to teach his actual subject, the natural sciences , shortly after he returned home from the war in 1918.

Dickel was an early member of the NSDAP and published in early 1921 with Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes an "Anti- Spengler ". In March 1921 he founded his own organization, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft . In it he combined social and life reform ideas with concepts of land reform according to Adolf Damaschke . At the same time, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft should advocate a corporate state order and a legal system based on the “Germanic nature”. Dickel maintained good relations with Augsburg trade union circles, which were more nationally Bolshevik . Until October 1922, however, Julius Streicher and his followers also belonged to the work group , the first director of which was Chief Railway Master Christian Lehmann (* 1867 in Limbach / Pf.), Who worked in Neustadt an der Aisch .

When Adolf Hitler traveled to Berlin in June 1921 to raise funds for the NSDAP, Dickel appeared as a speaker in Munich at the invitation of the party . The response was very positive, and on July 10, 1921, the Munich National Socialists and representatives of the Nuremberg DSP met with Dickel in Augsburg to discuss a possible merger. Surprisingly, Hitler also joined the conference and announced his resignation from the NSDAP the following day. Presumably Hitler acted emotionally because he feared losing his rank within the party. However , Hitler linked his re-entry, which Dietrich Eckart brokered, with far-reaching demands for dictatorial powers within the NSDAP, with which he could at the same time prevent a programmatic turn to the left by the party. After the party subordinated itself to Hitler in July 1921, Dickel was expelled on September 10th.

Together with Ludwig Herpel , Dickel was one of the intellectual fathers of the compensation fund idea, which he published in the winter of 1922/23. The practical implementation of this cashless clearing system based on interest-free loans took place in Rendsburg in 1931 . The success of the Rendsburg compensation fund led to the establishment of a large number of other compensation funds and similar systems throughout what was then the Reich. The compensation offices were banned in 1934 by the law against the abuse of cashless payment transactions in Germany.

Dickel was arrested in October 1934 and charged in December with alleged proximity to Otto Strasser before the People's Court . After ten months in prison, he was able to return to the Realgymnasium in February 1936, but was transferred to Hof a month later. However, Dickel did not take up the position in Hof because he retired early in 1936. At the beginning of the Second World War he moved near Reutlingen and made contact with opposition circles. After meeting with like-minded people in Karlsruhe , the Gestapo visited him. Obviously fearful of arrest, he committed suicide on June 15, 1944.

Foundation of Dickelsmoor

In 1926, the " Dickelsmoor horticultural settlement " near Augsburg was founded by members of the "Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft" (also known as the Werkgemeinschaft des Abendländischen Bund ) under Dickels' chairmanship. Otto Dickel was a follower of ergokratischen idea and wanted a "free unverschuldbare homestead " or a " Erblehengut " that the nation's food from our own soil should ensure. In the arbor colony northeast of Augsburg, a model of Dickel's settlement program was to be created.

The völkisch - anti-Semitic work community founded in March 1921 was in favor of peaceful economic cooperation with entrepreneurs and against the alleged rule of the Jews . Until 1923 this community in Augsburg was stronger than the NSDAP and even withdrew members from it.

Controversial yearbook Altbayern in Schwaben 2011

An article about the Dickelsmoor estate in 2011 in the yearbook Altbayern in Schwaben in the district of Aichach-Friedberg caused a stir in 2011 by the chairman of the Derching local history association , Leonhard Knauer . In it Knauer characterized Dickel as a "social nationalist" whose goals were "social justice, European cooperation and true humanity". The district parliamentary group of the Greens tried to prevent the delivery of the yearbook and requested an examination by the Munich Institute for Contemporary History . The district council, however, rejected this with a majority of 49: 7 votes.

Knauer's article was criticized for not addressing Dickel's anti-Semitism . In The Resurrection of the West (1921), Dickel wrote, among other things:

“Anyone who wants to solve the Jewish question - and it must be solved - must dig deep. He must recognize that the Jew only thrives where there is rot, that he only comes to power and becomes a terrible plague where his usury is not stopped. There is only one way to achieve this: by creating a right that makes it impossible for the original source of all ethnic cultural and economic life, the land and the exploitation of the usury, to fall victim to interest bondage and its protector, the party system , is eliminated. "

- Otto Dickel : The Resurrection of the West

family

His son Gerhard Dickel was a physical chemist and co-inventor of the Clusius Dickel separating tube.

Fonts

• Are drones made from fertilized eggs? . In: Bienenwirtschaftliches Centralblatt 40 (1904).
• The corn flies. E. Ulmer, Stuttgart 1906.
• On the question of gender determination in the Hymenoptera, especially in the honeybees. In: Bienenwirtschaftliches Centralblatt 34. (1914).
• The Resurrection of the Occident: Occidental culture as an outflow of the planetary world feeling; Development and future . Reichel Brothers, Augsburg 1921.
• How it comes and what we have to do . Self-published, Augsburg 1922.
• The key to the dungeon gate . Zwei Welten Verlag, Stade in Hanover 1923.
• Knowledge, goal and path of the German Work Community . Information sheets of the "Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft". 2nd edition, Zwei Welten Verlag, Stade in Hanover 1926.
• Guide to German economics, D. W. G. - People, freedom, fatherland, Augsburg 1926.
• Tax exemption brings work and bread . Verl. German Future A. Herpel, Hamburg 1931.
• Job creation through compensation funds . Th. Eisen, Munich 1932.
• Defense force and economy . Verl. Die Schwertschmiede, Leonberg-Stuttgart 1935.
• Organic Economics . Verl. Die Schwertschmiede, Leonberg-Stuttgart 1937.

literature

• Hellmuth Auerbach: Regional roots and differences of the NSDAP 1919-1923. Otto Dickel in Augsburg . In: Horst Möller (Ed.): National Socialism in the Region. Contributions to regional and local research and international comparison . Series of the quarterly books for contemporary history, special issue, Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-486-64500-5 , pp. 65–86.
• Bernhard Gotto: National Socialist Communal Policy: Administrative normality and system stabilization by the Augsburg city administration 1933-1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-486-57940-1 .
• Gerhard Hetzer: The industrial city of Augsburg. A social history of the workers' opposition. In: Martin Broszat and Hartmut Mehringer (eds.): Bavaria in the Nazi era. Oldenbourg, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-486-42381-9 , pp. 1-234.
• Leonhard Knauer: Dickelsmoor near Derching. An unusual genesis. In: Old Bavaria in Swabia. Yearbook for History and Culture , 2011, pp. 137–158.
• Mathias Rösch: The Munich NSDAP 1925–1933. An investigation into the internal structure of the NSDAP in the Weimar Republic . Oldenbourg, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-486-56670-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , p. 220.
2. ↑ Hellmuth Auerbach: Regional roots and differences in the NSDAP 1919–1923. In: Horst Möller, Andreas Wirsching and Walter Ziegler (eds.). National Socialism in the region. Contributions to regional and local research and international comparison. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 3486645005 , p. 79.
3. ↑ Hellmuth Auerbach: Regional roots and differences in the NSDAP 1919–1923. In: Horst Möller, Andreas Wirsching and Walter Ziegler (eds.). National Socialism in the region. Contributions to regional and local research and international comparison. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 3486645005 , p. 80f.
4. ↑ Stefan Mayr: District honors Jew haters as humanists. In: sueddeutsche.de. February 6, 2012, accessed February 8, 2012 . 
5. ↑ Thomas Gossner: Is a Nazi played down in the yearbook? In: augsburger-allgemeine.de. February 8, 2012, accessed February 8, 2012 . 
6. ↑ The Resurrection of the West. Occidental culture as an outflow of the planetary world feeling, development and future. 2nd edition, Zwei-Welten Verlag, Stade 1923, p. 58.

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Dickel in the catalog of the German National Library