Otto Lummitzsch

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Otto Lummitzsch (born February 10, 1886 in Leipzig-Plagwitz , † December 9, 1962 in Bonn ) was a German pioneer officer , architect and civil engineer as well as the founder of the technical emergency aid and the technical relief organization .

Life

Otto Lummitzsch was the son of a Silesian manor owner and agricultural machinery dealer. After attending a grammar school and later a secondary school, he obtained the Abitur and attended a technical school and a technical college. He became an architect and civil engineer. As such, he worked in Berlin until the beginning of the First World War , which he participated in as a pioneer officer until the end, and served as an adjutant in the Pioneer Regiment 35 . He was then a member of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division .

In January 1919 he founded and headed the Technical Department (TA), which consisted of former members of the Imperial Navy and Army as well as other volunteers. Since the TA and other military emergency aid could not continue in the long term due to the provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty , he created the civil aid organization Technische Nothilfe, which was later subordinated to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, in autumn 1919 .

Otto Lummitzsch was removed from the leadership of the TN in 1934 by the National Socialists because he refused to divorce his “half-Jewish” wife. Until June 1946, Lummitzsch was director of the central administration of the AEG in Berlin. He then worked there as a freelance engineer until August 1950.

In 1950 he was appointed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bonn and commissioned by the then Interior Minister Gustav Heinemann with the preparatory work and the reconstruction of the Technical Relief Organization (THW) , which three years later received the final legal form of a non-incorporated federal agency as the Federal Agency for Technical Relief . From that time Lummitzsch headed this institution as director until he resigned on April 15, 1955 because of exceeding the age limit. From September 1952 until he left the organization, the number of committed helpers had grown from around 6,000 to 40,000 and the number of local chapters to 377. On the occasion of his farewell party, Interior Minister Gerhard Schröder presented him with the Federal Cross of Merit .

Lummitzsch was married to Käthe, née Heilbronn, and had two daughters.

literature

  • Jochen von Arnim:  Lummitzsch, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , p. 518 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Andreas Linhardt: The technical emergency aid in the Weimar Republic. Books on Demand , Norderstedt 2006, ISBN 3-8334-4889-X (also: Dissertation, Technical University Braunschweig 2006).
  • Frank Flechtmann: Technical Emergency Aid, Air Protection and Forced Laborers , in: Arbeitskreis Berliner Regionalmuseen (ed.): Forced Labor in Berlin 1938–1945 , Berlin 2003, pp. 141–153 (with quotations from the Freksa estate in the Berlin State Library, the most extensive collection for participants in the years 1919–1945).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 125 years of Otto Lummitzsch - How it all began. Retrieved April 24, 2020 .
  2. ^ Margit Szöllösi-Janze: Fritz Haber (1868-1934). CH Beck, Munich 1989.
personal data
SURNAME Lummitzsch, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect and civil engineer, founder of the technical emergency aid and the technical relief organization
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Plagwitz near Löwenberg , Province of Silesia
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1962
Place of death Bonn