Otto Nuschke

Otto Nuschke at the German Evangelical Church Congress in 1956

Otto Nuschke monument in his native town of Frohburg

Grave of Otto Nuschke in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin.

Otto Nuschke badge of honor in bronze

Stamp issue for the 100th birthday of Otto Nuschke (GDR 1983)

Otto Gustav Nuschke (born February 23, 1883 in Frohburg ; † December 27, 1957 in Hennigsdorf ) was a German politician and CDU chairman in the Soviet zone of occupation and in the GDR as well as deputy prime minister of the GDR .

Life and work

After attending the community school in Frohburg , Nuschke, who was of Protestant faith, received private lessons for a while and then attended the Academy for Graphic Arts in Leipzig . He learned the printing trade from his father. In 1902 Nuschke became editor of the Hessische Landeszeitung in Marburg , whose management he took over a year later. During this time he attended lectures at the Philipps University of Marburg as a guest auditor . In 1910 Nuschke switched to the Berliner Tageblatt as editor . From 1915 to 1930 he was editor-in-chief of the Berliner Volks-Zeitung . He took part in the First World War as a private in the Guards Landsturm Battalion Zossen .

Nuschke was involved in the Association for International Understanding , in the Bund Deutscher Bodenreformer and the German Peace Society . After the National Socialists came to power, he initially ran a small farm near Berlin, which he had to give up due to political pressure. The assassins on July 20, 1944 , had designated him as head of the radio station. After the failed coup attempt, he had to go into hiding and survived until the end of the war in illegality.

In April 1949 Otto Nuschke was the spokesman for the German delegation that took part in the founding congress of the World Peace Movement in Paris.

On June 17, 1953 , the day of the popular uprising in the GDR, he was recognized by demonstrators, arrested , taken across the nearby sector border to West Berlin and handed over to the police there. After interrogation, he was released after 36 hours without suffering any harm. During an interview with the RIAS, he confessed to his state of GDR.

Otto Nuschke died in 1957 in Nieder Neuendorf , a district of Hennigsdorf near Berlin.

Entry for the normalization of church-state relations in the GDR

The neutrality of this article or section is disputed. A reason is given on the discussion page . You can get more information here .

Otto Nuschke campaigned for the normalization of church-state relations in the GDR in the 1950s and led intensive negotiations. At the invitation of the President of the Kirchentag, D. Dr. Reinold von Thadden-Trieglaff the all-German Kirchentag in Frankfurt am Main 1956. The political change of course of the GDR government from "Germans at a table" to the demand for recognition of the GDR as a sovereign state led to differences and polemics, with Nuschke appearing in the working group 3 was described by the Eastern CDU as "combative". As early as 1951 Otto Nuschke was a visitor to the Berlin Kirchentag, which had the slogan: “We are brothers”, together with Wilhelm Pieck, and there he spoke on questions of church politics. On August 6, 1956, Otto Nuschke, as party chairman of the Eastern CDU, received a delegation from the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany , which included synodals from the regional churches in the GDR, and discussed with her above all the “effects of general conscription in the FRG and the principles of recruiting volunteers for the NVA ”.

Honors

In 1955 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Karl Marx University in Leipzig (Dr. rer. Pol. Hc).

Nuschke was buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin.

In 1958, the Jägerstrasse in Berlin-Mitte was renamed Otto-Nuschke-Strasse ; it was renamed in 1991. The former house of the East CDU headquarters ( Otto-Nuschke-Haus ) located there on the corner of Charlottenstrasse and the so-called central training center of the CDU in Burgscheidungen were also named after Nuschke.

(Dr .-) Otto-Nuschke-Streets still exist today in Rüdersdorf near Berlin , Brusendorf , Senftenberg , Königsee , Calau , Rudolstadt , Aue , Oelsnitz / Erzgebirge , Greiz , Parchim , Frohburg and Fürstenwalde / Spree . Other street names were reversed after the democratic change . In addition to Berlin, this was, for example, Ehrensteinstrasse in Leipzig or Lindenstrasse in Potsdam , on which the remand prison for political prisoners was located during the time of National Socialism and the time of the GDR .

After his death, the GDR CDU donated the " Otto Nuschke Decoration " in the ranks of gold, silver and bronze, which was given to deserving members as the party's highest honor.

Political party

Nuschke joined the left-wing liberal Freethinking Association early on, and he became its party secretary in the Kassel district in 1906 . When the association merged with other left-liberal parties to form the Progressive People's Party in 1910 , he also took on this function in the new party. In the Reichstag election in 1912 , he ran in the Waldeck-Pyrmont constituency at the instigation of the previous MP Heinz Potthoff , but was narrowly defeated by the anti-Semitic candidate Georg Vietmeyer . After the election was declared invalid, he renounced a new candidacy in favor of Friedrich Naumann .

In 1918 he participated in the founding of the DDP . In the 1920s he was also the party's deputy chairman for a while. Nuschke was one of the co-founders of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , which was loyal to the republic, and in 1931 was appointed General Secretary of the German State Party, as the DDP was now called.

After the Second World War , in contrast to the majority of the earlier DDP members, Nuschke did not participate in the founding of the LDPD or FDP, but, like Ferdinand Friedensburg , Ernst Lemmer and Walther Schreiber , co-founded the CDU in the Soviet occupation zone in 1945. After the dismissal of the last freely elected CDU chairman Jakob Kaiser by the SMAD in December 1947 - the CDU executive committee under Kaiser had refused the CDU 's participation in the people 's congress - Nuschke was at the III. CDU party congress in September 1948 appointed party chairman.

MP

In 1919 Nuschke was a member of the Weimar National Assembly . In 1921 he was elected a member of the Prussian Landtag , to which he belonged until 1933.

In the state elections in the Soviet Zone in 1946 , Nuschke was a member of the state parliament in the Brandenburg state parliament and in Saxony-Anhalt , which was possible at the time. He was also a member of the Osthavelland district council . In March 1948, together with Wilhelm Pieck ( SED ) and Wilhelm Külz ( LDPD ), he became chairman of the German People's Council , which drafted the constitution of the GDR . In 1949 he became a member of the Provisional People's Chamber of the GDR . He then belonged to the People's Chamber until his death.

Public offices

Nuschke was Deputy Prime Minister of the GDR from 1949 until his death .

Publications

• Man, politician, journalist , Union-Verlag, Berlin 1953.
• Not next to each other - together! (with Heinrich Grüber ), Verlag Deutscher Friedensrat, Berlin 1955.
• Speeches and essays. 1919–1950 , Union-Verlag, Berlin 1957.
• Reminder and example. Speeches and essays from the years 1951–1957 , Union-Verlag, Berlin 1958 (posthumously).
• A life for the interests of the people , Union-Verlag, Berlin 1983 (posthumous).

literature

• Gerhard Fischer: Otto Nuschke. A picture of life . Union-Verlag, Berlin 1983, DNB 830365699 .
• Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Nuschke, Otto . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Christian Ostermann:  Nuschke, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 375 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Rosemarie Schuder : Otto Nuschke. Man, politician, journalist (= library of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany , Volume 1), Union Verlag, Berlin 1953, DNB 453616690 .
• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
• Günter Wirth: Otto Nuschke (= Christian in the world , volume 1). Union-Verlag, Berlin 1965 DNB 455708401 .
• Christoph Wunnicke: Otto Nuschke. In: The block parties of the GDR. Continuities and Transformation 1945–1990. Berlin 2014 (= series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR , Volume 34), pp. 22–29 ( PDF; 434 kB ).

Web links

Commons : Otto Nuschke  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Otto Nuschke in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Otto Nuschke in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Otto Nuschke in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Otto Nuschke in the files of the Reich Chancellery
• Otto Nuschke and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jürgen Wilke: Press instructions in the twentieth century: First World War, Third Reich, GDR. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Vienna 2007, p. 28.
2. ↑ Presentation of the arrest with a RIAS interview .
3. ^ Representation of the Eastern CDU .
4. ↑ Manfred Hagen: GDR - June '53 Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-515-06007-3 , p. 148.
5. ↑ Klaus Euhausen: Nieder Neuendorf - On the history of a Brandenburg village , 2020, pp. 77–79.
6. ^ Günter Wirth: Otto Nuschke (= Christian in the world ), Union Verlag, Berlin 1965, p. 31.
7. ↑ Günter Wirth: Otto Nuschke (= Christian in the world ), Union Verlag, Berlin 1965, p. 28 u. 32.
8. ↑ Carola Wolf (Ed.): Twenty Years of the Kirchentag. The German Evangelical Church Congress between 1949 and 1969 , Kreuz-Verlag, Stuttgart 1969, p. 48.
9. ^ Günter Wirth: Otto Nuschke (= Christ in the World , Volume 1), Union Verlag, Berlin 1965, p. 32.
10. ^ Gerhard Fischer: Otto Nuschke. A picture of life . Union Verlag, Berlin 1983, p. 227.
11. ↑ Timeline for the history of the CDU (= booklets from Burgscheidungen , No. 207). Compiled by Volker Kahl; Final editing: Gerhard Fischer, 1977, p. 25.
12. ↑ Cf. Thomas Nipperdey : The organization of German parties before 1918 (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties . Volume 18), Droste, Düsseldorf 1961, p. 195, note 3 DNB 481047409 (Habilitation Göttingen, Philosophical Faculty, 1961).