Otto Karsten

Otto Karsten (born August 23, 1899 in Grittel ; † 1967 ) was a German CDU politician and Protestant preacher.

Life

Otto Karsten was born in Grittel in the Mecklenburg-Schwerin Domanialamt Dömitz as the son of the farm worker Karl Karsten (* 1875) and the bricklayer's daughter Friederike, née. Schütt (* 1878).

After attending the community school in Dömitz, Karsten completed a commercial training in Dömitz from 1914 to 1916. Karsten worked as a businessman until January 1918, when he was drafted as a telecommunications soldier on the Western Front. After his release from captivity, he returned to Dömitz, was employed as a clerk for a short time and finally went to Switzerland, where he attended the St. Chrischona seminary near Basel until August 1923 . From 1923 to 1929 Karsten was a preacher in Ticino (near Rostock) and Bad Doberan , and from the summer of 1929 travel secretary of the Reich Association of German Protestant School Communities in Pomerania, East Prussia, Silesia and southern Germany. In 1935 Karsten was banned from speaking by the Gestapo in Mecklenburg, and in 1937 he became unemployed because the Reich Association was dissolved. In 1939 he became managing director of the Zarrentin dairy cooperative.

Otto Karsten founded the CDU local group Zarrentin on September 7, 1945 with five other comrades-in- arms , which was one of the first ten local groups in Mecklenburg of the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania regional association based in Schwerin. He was elected chairman. In the municipal and state elections , Karsten received a mandate for both the city council and the state parliament . At first he was unable to exercise either of these mandates, as the criminal police arrested him two days before the election on October 20, 1946. The German police arrested him on the pretext of withholding large quantities of butter and milk. The Soviet secret police accused him of anti-Soviet agitation and obviously wanted to disrupt the CDU election campaign. Karsten was only released in December and was elected to the city council in Zarrentin. Karsten belonged to the state parliament until July 1950 and worked on the culture and fuel committee. In May 1947 he was elected to the state executive committee of the CDU Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . After the CDU economics minister Siegfried Wittes was dismissed in January 1950, Karsten also came under fire after foiling a resolution against Witte in the Zarrentin city council. Karsten gave up his mandate in the state parliament and moved with his family to Thuringia, where he worked as a preacher again.

swell

• "The Otto Karsten case", 2nd part of the permanent exhibition in the Schwerin Documentation Center of the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for the victims of German dictatorships, hanging file 9.2, Reinhild Wienicke private archive, Schwerin
• Schwabe, Klaus: State election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 1946. Booklet accompanying the exhibition in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state parliament from August 28 to October 20, 1996, Schwerin 1996
• Christian Schwießelmann: The CDU in Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania 1945 to 1952. From the foundation to the dissolution of the regional association. A representation of party history . Droste, Düsseldorf 2010, ISBN 978-3-7700-1909-0 , ( research and sources on contemporary history 58).
• Martin Broszat , Hermann Weber (Ed.): SBZ manual. State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany 1945 - 1949 . 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-55262-7 , p. 536.

Web links

• Literature about Otto Karsten in the state bibliography MV

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CDU daily newspaper Neue Zeit, October 4, 1945, p. 4