Paul Hach

Paul Hach (born August 3, 1893 in Magdeburg ; † July 6, 1976 in Unterschleißheim / Bavaria) was a German administrative and banking specialist in high positions. In 1946 Hach became the only freely elected, short-term Lord Mayor of Erfurt in the former Soviet Zone . The SED forced his resignation through imprisonment and fled to the western zones .

Live and act

After his parents had moved, Hach attended the public school and the secondary school in Erfurt. This was followed by 5 ¹ ⁄ ₂  years of banking apprenticeship and assistant time in an Erfurt bank branch. Hach was a soldier from 1913 , participated in the First World War and was seriously wounded twice. In 1919/20 he worked at the Reichsbank in Erfurt, then as an authorized signatory in his father-in-law's company and from 1923 back in banking. In 1928 Hach followed a call to Berlin to the German Cooperative Association as an auditor and auditor. From there he was assigned to reorganize a credit institution in Prague . In 1935, Hach went to Schaffhausen / Switzerland as managing director of an asset management company . From 1938 he was commercial director of Wien-Film in Vienna . Hach was a Freemason and not in the NSDAP. At the end of 1944 he was drafted into the Volkssturm and released to Erfurt after the war. Here he joined the LDPD and in 1946 became head of trade and supply .

SED election poster in Erfurt in 1946

Local elections were held in Erfurt on September 8, 1946 . The day before, September 7th, the SED put up large numbers of posters in the streets of Erfurt accusing Paul Hach of “sabotaging the meat supply” of the Erfurt citizens.

Nevertheless, the LDPD was voted the strongest party. So she had the right to propose the post of mayor. Accordingly, on September 26th, Paul Hach was elected Lord Mayor with the votes of the LDPD and CDU , as the successor to Georg Boock (SED) appointed by the SMAD . The Soviet city ​​commandant confirmed Hach as mayor and even offered him a villa as a residence, which Hach refused. In a newspaper interview, the new mayor described his most urgent task as the constant concern for the improvement of the food situation, the housing situation and the accommodation of the displaced persons from the eastern regions . Three days before the state elections, on October 17, 1946, Hach was picked up by the police at night, taken to the Weimar police prison and from there to the Ichtershausen penitentiary , where he was held in solitary confinement in convict clothing. The accusation was: violation of order 50 of the SMAD and “sabotage of the coal supply” . The Erfurt transport vehicles for this purpose had been assigned to the Thuringian Forest. Now the LDPD city councilors were put under pressure until they waived their parliamentary group's right to propose the OB with a narrow majority and ceded it to the SED. Immediately thereafter, on November 19, Hach was out of the prison dismissed. At the beginning of December, the city parliament elected Georg Boock (SED) as mayor with the votes of the bloc parties .

In January 1947, Hach was appointed to the office for interzonal and foreign trade that was to be established. Under threat of criminal proceedings, he had to resign from this position in March 1949 and then went to the western zones with his wife . There he became managing director of the " Neue Deutschen" (newsreel ) in 1950 . In 1960 Paul Hach took part in the annual meeting of the Thuringia national team, at which the establishment of the Erfurt loyalty association was decided. He was the guest of honor at their meeting in Mainz in 1965. Widowed since 1967, Paul Hach died at the age of 85 in an old people's home in Unterschleißheim.

Hach had married a pharmacist's daughter from Erfurt, and the marriage resulted in two sons and a daughter. A son was killed in Stalingrad.

After the German reunification there was an application in the early 1990s to name a street in Erfurt after Paul Hach, but this was never realized.

literature

• Joint working group of the CDU and the FDP in Erfurt: Erfurt personalities 1933 to 1990 . Volume 6: Paul Hach . Location of the file: Erfurt City Archives .
• Rudolf Mohr: On the 100th birthday of Paul Hach on August 3, 1993 . In: Erfurter Allgemeine (part of the Thüringer Allgemeine ), August 3, 1993.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The cry for freedom in Thuringia . Exhibition of the Ettersberg Foundation in the Thuringian Parliament from June 14th to 30th, 2012 in memory of June 17th, 1953 in the GDR