Otto Wyrgatsch
Otto Wyrgatsch (born February 17, 1884 in Dresden , † November 12, 1933 in Copenhagen ) was a German publicist and trade unionist.
Live and act
After attending school, Wyrgatsch was trained as a machine technician. At the turn of the century he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the trade union movement, in which he soon took over functionary posts. Since 1912 he has held the position of shop steward for the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV).
In 1913 and 1914 Wyrgatsch was a reporter for the Hamburger Abendblatt . After the First World War he joined the editorial team of the Hildesheimer Volksblatt before he became editor-in-chief of the social democratic Königsberger Volkszeitung in Koenigsberg in 1920 , a position he was to keep until 1933. According to his social democratic comrades, Wyrgatsch wielded a “sharp blade against the daily cheeky fascism” which made him one of the “best hated” men in the camp of the extreme political right.
In addition to his journalistic work, Wyrgatsch took on a number of public offices in Königsberg: He was a city councilor for the city and a member of the provincial parliament of the province of East Prussia, as well as chairman of the cultural advisory board of the Ostmarksender and a member of the supervisory board of the Königsberg municipal theaters.
On the night of the Reichstag elections on July 31, 1932 , Wyrgatsch was attacked by members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) in his apartment on Scharnhorststrasse in Königsberg in the course of the National Socialist terror campaign that was spreading across East Prussia , and he was shot in the thigh. At the time, the attack attracted a great deal of attention from the German public: Thomas Mann used the incident as an occasion for an editorial critical of Nazi Germany in the Berliner Tageblatt .
Shortly after the National Socialists came to power, Wyrgatsch fled into exile in Denmark , where he died in November 1933. His obituary in the New Forward attributed his death to a "serious heart disease" that he had contracted "through all the excitement". In the literature, on the other hand, the claim often appears that he died as a result of the gunshot wound he suffered in 1932.
Web links
literature
- Otto Wyrgatsch . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Vol. 1, Hannover 1960, p. 339.
- German biographical encyclopedia , Vol. 10, p. 602.
Individual evidence
- ^ Winfried B. Lerg: Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik , 1980, p. 464.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wyrgatsch, Otto |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German publicist and trade unionist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 17, 1884 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dresden |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 12, 1933 |
| Place of death | Copenhagen |