Otto Rüdiger (politician)

Otto Rüdiger (born September 23, 1885 in Magdeburg , † March 30, 1976 in Goslar ) was a German politician (SPD).

Life

The metalworker Rüdiger, who grew up in an orphanage, joined the SPD in 1906. In 1919 he became chairman of the Wolfenbüttel local association. In 1922 he was elected to the city council. In 1923 he was head of the interior authorities. He later worked as managing director of the AOK Wolfenbüttel. On September 12, 1932, after a move of the Reich Banner , in which a shot had been fired, he was replaced by the Nazi government of the state of Braunschweig as deputy head of the Wolfenbüttel city police authority. He initially took over the management of the AOK Harzburg and later tried his hand at being a retailer.

In August 1938 he was arrested by the Gestapo with 60 other former communists and social democrats (including Otto Grotewohl ) and spent several months in custody, but was released without trial. From May 1, 1939, he worked as a commercial clerk for the spirits company of his political opponent Curt Mast ("Jägermeister").

After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, Rüdiger was arrested as part of the “thunderstorm” campaign and spent months in the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. His employer Mast campaigned for his liberation, and he was released on December 1, 1944, while 13 other Brunswick Social Democrats, including the former Prime Minister Heinrich Jasper , were murdered in Bergen-Belsen or the camp conditions did not survive.

After the end of the war, Rüdiger took over the management of AOK Wolfenbüttel again and was elected to the city council, where he headed the social democratic-communist unitary faction. On February 12, 1946, he was unanimously elected mayor after the former Social Democratic mayor, Willy Mull , who had been appointed by the Allies, had taken over the office of city director.

On December 14, 1948, a new mayor was elected according to schedule. Rüdiger was replaced by a CDU member and refused the office of deputy mayor. In 1951 he was surprisingly re-elected mayor with a majority of one vote, but resigned from office in 1952 and withdrew from local politics. In retirement he wrote a very meticulous history of the SPD Wolfenbüttel.

From February 21 to November 21, 1946, Rüdiger was a member of the newly appointed Braunschweig Landtag.

literature

• Barbara Simon : Member of Parliament in Lower Saxony 1946–1994. Biographical manual. Edited by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Lower Saxony State Parliament, Hanover 1996, p. 319.
• Otto Rüdiger: Political Career of Mayor Otto Rüdiger (September 5, 1946). Typescript in the Wolfenbüttel State Archives
• Otto Rüdiger: History of the SPD Wolfenbüttel. 2 vols. Typescript no year in the Wolfenbüttel State Archives
• Klaus Erich Pollmann : beginning and end at the same time. The Braunschweig State Parliament in 1946. Braunschweig 1999