Otto Schottenheim

Otto Schottenheim (born October 20, 1890 in Regensburg ; † September 2, 1980 there ) was a German doctor and politician ( NSDAP ). He was Lord Mayor of Regensburg from 1933 to 1945 .

Live and act

Otto Schottenheim was born in Regensburg in 1890 as the son of a postal worker. There he attended elementary school and the new grammar school and studied medicine at the universities of Würzburg , Erlangen and Munich . In 1912 he became a member of the Bubenreuther fraternity .

After obtaining his doctorate in 1920, Schottenheim settled in Regensburg as a general practitioner.

He took part in World War I as a hospital doctor, then joined the “Sengmüller” free corps company and took part in the bloody suppression of the Soviet Republic in Bavaria in May 1919. In 1922 he was politically active in the far-right Bund Oberland , later in the Nazi association Lebensborn .

As early as April 1, 1929, he joined the NSDAP as member no. 122.988 and shortly afterwards the SS (member number 1.527). He also became a member of the SA and many other Nazi organizations.

Otto Schottenheim's work in the National Socialist regime

After the so-called seizure of power by the NSDAP, the incumbent mayor Otto Hipp was forced to resign under pressure from the SA on March 20, 1933, and Schottenheim was named honorary mayor and successor on the same day. In October 1934, Schottenheim was elected professional mayor by the city council and then gave up his medical practice. After an initial hiatus, Schottenheim left the second mayor, Hans Herrmann, who had been in office for the Bavarian People's Party since 1925 . Schottenheim chose military and theater affairs as well as settlement management as his personal focus of work. In addition to many committees, he was a member of the Messerschmitt GmbH advisory board . In Schottenheim's time as NSDAP mayor, u. a. the construction of the Schottenheimsiedlung , then named after him , today Konradsiedlung or the Westheimsiedlung . In the SA he rose to the rank of medical brigade leader. In the SS he held the rank of SS brigade leader from April 20, 1944 . As a medical officer, Schottenheim took part in the first weeks of the German war of aggression against Poland and found enthusiastic words for it. Schottenheim advocated u. a. the practice of Nazi forced sterilization . On April 30, 1945, Schottenheim was captured and imprisoned.

post war period

In the summer of 1947, Schottenheim was charged with the “main culprit” in the denazification process and sentenced as such to four and a half years in a labor camp and to confiscate his property. The argumentation of his defense lawyers that Schottenheim saved Regensburg from destruction by handing it over to the US armed forces without a fight was not followed by the camp judgment chamber. The Appeals Chamber classified him on August 27, 1948 as “less burdened”; after three years in prison he was released. In the so-called “synagogue fire trial” in 1949, Schottenheim was acquitted, although he was at the scene of the crime on November 9, 1938 before the fire brigade arrived “and personally prevented possible extinguishing work on the synagogue itself”.

Memorial plaque for Schottenheim until the mid-1990s on the community house of the settlers' association

In the 1950s, Schottenheim, meanwhile denazified as a so-called follower , worked again as a doctor. After the Regensburg city council had repeatedly rejected a city pension payment for his time as mayor, the Bavarian state government decreed in 1955 that the city had to pay a pension to the former National Socialist mayor Schottenheim. This happened at the insistence of Hans Herrmann , who had meanwhile been elected first mayor for the CSU and who was second mayor under Schottenheim from 1933 to 1945.

At the beginning of August 1959, Lord Mayor Hans Herrmann had a memorial plaque put up on the community house of the settlers' association in the Konradsiedlung. It honors the work of Schottenheim (and Herrmann) without addressing the Nazi regime or its ethnic- racist settler policy. After the community center was demolished, the panel was renovated and taken to the depot of the Historical Museum .

Memorial policy

In his obituary from September 1980, Lord Mayor Friedrich Viehbacher (CSU) described his predecessor Schottenheim as a disinterested follower of the Nazi regime. In the last days of the war in April 1945, Schottenheim saved the city of Regensburg from destruction at risk of death through the unconditional surrender he allegedly instructed. This untruthful and agreeable presentation essentially corresponds to Schottenheim's defense strategy during his denazification negotiations. Three years after Schottenheim's death, Robert Bürger claimed to have saved Regensburg from destruction. Mayor Schottenheim made this possible by providing city trucks at short notice. Since 1992, the subjective representation of Bürger has also been considered refuted.

literature

• Waltraud Bierwirth and Klaus Himmelstein: The November Pogrom 1938 and the long road to a new synagogue , Walhallanet Regensburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-9814689-4-6 .
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , pp. 321-322.
• Berta Rathsam: The big mistake. Dr. med. Schottenheim followers? , Golddistel Verlag Regensburg 1981.
• Stefan Maier: Schottenheim. “The new city near Regensburg” as a folk community settlement (= Regensburger Schriften zur Volkskunde, Volume 8), Bamberg 1992, ISBN 3-927392-30-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , p. 322.
2. ↑ Helmut Halter: City under the swastika. Local politics in Regensburg during the Nazi era. (Ed. by the museums and the archive of the city of Regensburg), 1994, p. 77. All biographical information comes from Halter (1994).
3. ↑ German Leader Lexicon: 1934/1935. Berlin Stollberg, 1934, p. 435.
4. ↑ Axis Biographical Research: Entry Otto Schottenheim (see under Waffen-SS)
5. ↑ Helmut Halter: Stadt unterm Hakenkreuz , 1994, p. 189.
6. ↑ Helmut Halter: Stadt unterm Hakenkreuz , 1994, p. 91.
7. ^ Stefan Maier: Schottenheim. "The new city near Regensburg" , 1992, p. 196.
8. ↑ Robert Werner: SS-Brigadführer Schottenheim als Retter der Stadt , 2012 (article on regensburg-digital ; last accessed July 2012)
9. ^ Peter Eiser, Günter Schießl: End of the war in Regensburg. Revision of a legend , 2012, p. 111.