Otto Ulitz

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Otto Ulitz

Otto Ulitz (born September 28, 1885 in Kempten (Allgäu) , † October 28, 1972 in Borgholzhausen ) was a German politician . In the interwar period he was the leading representative of the German minority in Eastern Upper Silesia as President of the German People's Union and as a member of the Silesian Parliament . In the Federal Republic of Germany he was the longstanding spokesman for the Oberschlesier Landsmannschaft .

Life

Otto Ulitz was born in Bavaria . His father was a railway official and came from Breslau . Otto Ulitz grew up with his brother Arnold in Katowitz, Upper Silesia . He was a member of the police there from 1902 to 1920 . East Upper Silesia was ceded to Poland as a result of the Treaty of Versailles and the uprisings in Upper Silesia . Together with a medical council from Beuthen, Ulitz was a member of the German Plebiscite Committee for the preparation of the plebiscite on March 20, 1921 for the German Democratic Party .

After Eastern Upper Silesia was ceded to Poland, the German People's Federation for Polish Silesia (Volksbund) was founded in November 1921 . From its founding until 1939, Ulitz was president of the Volksbund, which was the umbrella organization for German cultural, charitable and economic organizations in East Upper Silesia and had up to 35,000 members. From 1922 to 1935 Ulitz was also responsible for the German party deputy of the German minority in the Silesian Parliament in the first to third legislature. He was thus the leading representative of the German minority in Eastern Upper Silesia. In 1927, Ulitz was officially accused by the Polish side of aiding and abetting deserters and that he had helped Germans in Upper Silesia to evade conscription in the Polish army . Due to his immunity as a member of parliament, no proceedings could be opened against Ulitz, but the Polish Foreign Minister Zaleski repeated the accusations in 1928 before the Commission of the League of Nations . After the Silesian Parliament rejected a new application by the Upper Silesian Vojwoden Michał Grażyński for the lifting of Ulitz's immunity, President Mościcki unceremoniously dissolved the Silesian Parliament. A few hours later, Ulitz was arrested and sentenced to five months in prison on the basis of forged documents.

Ulitz is said to have been involved in the preparations for the fictitious attack on the Gleiwitz transmitter , which served as one of the pretexts for the attack on Poland . On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and started the Second World War . After the end of the fighting in Poland on October 6, 1939, Otto Ulitz, although not yet a member of the NSDAP at the time, received the NSDAP's golden party badge on October 18, 1939, “for services to Germanness”. East Upper Silesia was again added to the German Empire and united with the German part of Silesia to form the Reichsgau Oberschlesien . Since Ulitz had only become a German citizen again through the annexation of his home region of Upper Silesia, he could not have joined the party until autumn 1939 at the earliest, but did not actually join the NSDAP until October 1, 1941 (membership number 8.712.129). The capital of the Reichsgau was Katowice . Ulitz was appointed Ministerialrat and, as a department head in the Gau government, was responsible for the school system before moving to the Ministry of the Interior of the Reichsgau. According to Michael Schwartz, historian at the Institute for Contemporary History , Ulitz “made himself consciously and actively available to the Nazi regime between 1939 and 1945”. In his function as head of the state school administration of the Upper Silesia region, Ulitz was responsible for “no concrete crimes”, but he implemented the Nazi education policy , which “inevitably resulted in a racist Germanization policy”. In addition, "politically motivated measures taken by teachers and students in his area of ​​responsibility" were rigidly implemented.

After the war ended, Ulitz was arrested by the NKVD in 1945 and imprisoned first in Poland and then in the Soviet Zone / GDR . In 1952 he was released to the Federal Republic, where he was elected spokesman for the Landsmannschaft der Oberschlesier in 1953 and represented “decidedly right-wing conservative positions”. In 1956 he was proposed by the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Karl Arnold for the Federal Cross of Merit. After the NSDAP's golden party badge became known, the proposal was withdrawn. In 1957 Ulitz wrote the narrow volume “From the History of Upper Silesia”, which appeared in 1962 and 1971 in the second and third, respectively expanded, editions. In 1960 Ulitz was defeated in a voting against Hans Krüger for the chairmanship of the Association of Expellees .

With reference to his alleged involvement in the planning of the attack on the Gleiwitz transmitter, Ulitz was listed together with 1,800 business leaders, politicians and leading officials of the Federal Republic in the Brown Book published by the GDR for propaganda purposes .

Two years after Ulitz's death, a biography of Ulitz was published in 1974 by Oberschlesisches Heimatverlag. He was a member of the Historical Commission for Silesia .

Awards

literature

  • Richard Blanke: Orphans of Versailles: the Germans in western Poland 1918-1939 . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington (KY) 1993. ISBN 0-8131-1803-4 .
  • Michael Schwartz : Functionaries with a past. The founding board of the Association of Expellees and the "Third Reich." Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71626-9 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Manfred Kittel: Expulsion of the Expellees? The historical German East in the culture of remembrance of the Federal Republic (1961-1982) . Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, p. 17. ISBN 3-486-58087-6 . (Published in a series of publications by the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich.)
  2. ^ Walter Gruenfeld: Retrospectives . Paperbackshop - Echo Library, 2006. ISBN 978-1406810158 . (Memoirs in BoD-Verlag.)
  3. ^ Richard Blanke: Orphans of Versailles: the Germans in western Poland 1918-1939 . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington (KY) 1993, p. 57. ISBN 0-8131-1803-4 .
  4. ^ Richard Blanke: Orphans of Versailles: the Germans in western Poland 1918 - 1939 . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington (KY) 1993, pp. 16-17. ISBN 0-8131-1803-4 .
  5. ↑ a b Otto Ulitz . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1956, pp. 48 ( Online - March 14, 1956 ).
  6. ↑ Michael Schwartz: Functionaries with a past. The founding board of the Association of Expellees and the "Third Reich." Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 525
  7. ↑ Michael Schwartz: Functionaries with a past. The founding board of the Association of Expellees and the "Third Reich." Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 525 u. P. 582.
  8. ^ Richard Blanke: Orphans of Versailles: the Germans in western Poland 1918-1939 . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington (KY) 1993, p. 238. ISBN 0-8131-1803-4 .
  9. ↑ Michael Schwartz: Functionaries with a past. The founding board of the Association of Expellees and the "Third Reich." Oldenbourg, Munich 2013, p. 530.
  10. ↑ Otto Ulitz: From the history of Upper Silesia . Bundesverband der Landsmannschaft der Oberschlesier eV, Bonn 1957. Second, expanded edition 1962. Third, greatly expanded edition 1971 under the title Oberschlesien - From its history .
  11. ↑ Manfred Kittel: Expulsion of the Expellees? . Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, p. 16. ISBN 3-486-58087-6 .
  12. ↑ Norbert Podewin (Ed.): "Brown Book". War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. State, economy, administration, army, justice, science . Edition Ost, Berlin 2002. ISBN 3-360-01033-7 (reprint of the 3rd edition from 1968). Entry on Otto Ulitz ( memento from October 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
  13. ^ Gerhard Webersinn: Otto Ulitz - a life for Upper Silesia . Oberschlesischer Heimatverlag, Augsburg 1974.
    The author Gerhard Webersinn himself comes from Silesia and turned to Silesian history after his retirement as a judge at the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster (1969).
  14. ^ Fifty Years of the Historical Commission for Silesia . In: Yearbook of the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau, Volume 17, 1972, list of members p. 416
personal data
SURNAME Ulitz, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician, spokesman for the Oberschlesier Landsmannschaft
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Kempten (Allgäu)
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 1972
Place of death Borgholzhausen