Central Postal Service

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Flag on the company car of the presidents of the OPDn , PTZ and FTZ , 15 cm × 25 cm ,? ?Service flag on land Historic flag

The Posttechnisches Zentralamt (PTZ) was a central agency of the Deutsche Bundespost . It was founded by an official ruling on March 14, 1949 and had its seat in Darmstadt . With its establishment, there was a central office for the postal system for the first time in German postal history. In 1989 the PTZ was subordinated to the General Directorate of the Deutsche Bundespost POSTDIENST and was integrated into it in 1993.

tasks

The PTZ had the task of bringing the postal service to the highest possible efficiency and cost-effectiveness by central evaluation of practical experience and scientific knowledge. In general, it has all supraregional tasks outside of the actual business area of ​​the Federal Post Office, which were to be regulated centrally and which did not fall within the remit of the Telecommunications Central Office (FTZ) or the supply agency of the Deutsche Bundespost , i.e. tasks of general administration, the postal system, the To deal with automotive and mechanical engineering as well as budget, cash and accounting and to promote practical activities through own developments, to summarize the procurement system and to advise the Oberpostdirektion. The PTZ then had the following tasks in particular:

  • Business and ergonomic as well as technical investigations
  • technical and economic reviews of improvement possibilities and inventions
  • Development, design, typification and standardization work including participation in the German Standards Committee and the Committee for Economic Administration (AWV)
  • Participation in operational and technical planning
  • Maintenance of the exchange of experiences in the individual branches of service
  • Implementation and evaluation of the operating and cost accounting as well as the statistics of the Deutsche Bundespost
  • Drafting of work procedures, regulations, service instructions and issuing of postal routing aids
  • Participation in training and examinations (Post)
  • Measures to control the motor vehicle workshops, vehicle maintenance and resource management
  • Procurement of rail mail cars, motor vehicles, machines, devices, business needs, printing works, etc. within the scope of the overview of responsibilities for the procurement of the Deutsche Bundespost ZÜB - Postbedarf
  • Measures of price and quality control
  • Price agreements as well as drawing up contractual and technical delivery conditions.

Significant work results

Fluorescent stamp paper

Since the end of the 1950s, the PTZ has been experimenting with options for machine mailing. This should enable machine stamping and sorting. The variant of adding luminescent materials to the stamps promised the greatest success . After laboratory tests, the PTZ was driven by corresponding postage stamps, which can only be distinguished from the usual issues only under ultraviolet light , for sale to the population and sold from August 1, 1960 at post offices in the Darmstadt area. The results were improved in cooperation with the industry so that from the mid-1960s onwards only postage stamp paper with fluorescent properties was used for West German postage stamps.

Postcodes

see also: Postcode (Germany)

Since 1941, there have been routing areas in Germany to simplify the sorting of shipments. However, this was only of limited help, as there were more than 30 places called Neustadt in the “old” Federal Republic alone . So the staff had to be carefully trained and have high memory skills. Against this background, the PTZ was in charge of developing the world's first postal code system, which was introduced in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961. The postcode consisted of four digits. After reunification , the concept, which in terms of conception could have been introduced in the new federal states, was fundamentally revised and adapted to technical and organizational changes. The new, now five-digit postcode was introduced on July 1, 1993.

Automatic letter distribution

After various tests in the laboratory and in practice, machines for automatic letter distribution were gradually introduced from the beginning of the 1970s. A combination of machine reading and manual coding was used, i.e. letters whose postal code could not be read by machine were recorded by a camera and displayed on a screen by a coder who read and entered the postal code. The result of the reading or entry was a code on the envelope, which enabled the subsequent automatic sorting in letter distribution systems.

Other fields of activity

The PTZ played a key role in the development of rail mail cars , of uniform containers for the transpost of items, such as those based on the Bauer and Weber systems , inside and outside of post offices, the design and equipment of post offices, parcel distribution systems, and special automotive technology for the post as well as in data processing. In addition, upon request, the PTZ was able to assign a “PTZ number” for packaging, the primary task of which was to certify the fee-relevant property “not bulky” for parcel packaging.

In order to be able to determine the one millionth television subscriber, the official gazette of the Federal Minister for the Post and Telecommunications System (number 93 of the 1957 year) ordered overtime for the post office officials.

Postal reform and the consequences

As part of the Post Reform I and the resulting division into Deutsche Bundespost POSTDIENST, Deutsche Bundespost POSTBANK and Deutsche Bundespost TELEKOM (spelling as in the original!), There were also changes for the PTZ. The tasks previously carried out by the PTZ for the postal giro and postal savings bank service have been outsourced from the PTZ and partially relocated to the Postbank General Directorate and the Postgiroamt Frankfurt. The historically developed support for the data processing of the telecommunications accounting service was handed over to the FTZ . This left the PTZ only with the tasks that originally belonged to the postal service.

Locations

The former Central Post Office in Darmstadt, Luisenplatz
The former Central Post Office in Darmstadt, Hilpertstrasse. The building is now in private hands and is being given a new purpose.
Art in architecture : “Papyrus” by Arnaldo Pomodoro

From 1948 the PTZ was housed together with the FTZ in Darmstadt in the Guard Dragoons barracks of the former 6th Cavalry Regiment of the Wehrmacht, built between 1937 and 1939 . In 1962 it moved into a new building on Darmstadt's Luisenplatz ( 49 ° 52 ′ 23.4 ″  N , 8 ° 39 ′ 0 ″  E ). The building was built according to plans by the Frankfurt architects Max Meid and Helmut Romeick at a construction cost of around 19 million DM. A post office and the Reichspostdirektion Darmstadt were previously housed on part of the area. However, the space available in the complex was too small for the entire staff, so that up to twelve properties were also rented. In 1966, a 165,000 square meter plot of land in Neu-Kranichstein was acquired for a new building project . The architecture firm Novotny und Mähner won the architecture competition in 1970 with a 149-meter high-rise building. Due to the calculated costs of 273 million DM, which clearly exceeded the budget of 150 million DM, the planning was discontinued. From 1986 to 1989 a new building with a volume of 196,000 m³ at a cost of around 154 million DM was finally built on Hilpertstrasse ( 49 ° 51 ′ 45.6 ″  N , 8 ° 37 ′ 22.2 ″  E ) for the then around 1,600 employees. The art object Papyrus by Arnaldo Pomodoro was installed in front of the building . The building on Luisenplatz was sold to the State of Hesse and has been used by the Darmstadt Regional Council since then .

President

The PTZ was headed by a president who was ranked on an equal footing with the presidents of the small upper post offices (OPD). He was the superior of the members of the PTZ and had the same powers as the presidents of the OPDn regarding the appointment of officials. Its permanent representative was the vice-president. According to the old salary order B in group B8, the presidents were paid with tariff class II of the housing subsidy. After the reform of the salary law, this corresponded to B6, the Vice President was paid to B3. In both cases this corresponded to the same grade as that of the presidents of the small or later medium-sized Oberpostdirektion.

The presidents were

  1. Paul Korde , from March 14, 1949 to February 29, 1964
  2. Reinhold Meyer , from March 1, 1964 to February 28, 1977
  3. Helmut Pfister , from March 1, 1977 to February 28, 1990
  4. Helmut Bielefeld , from March 1, 1990

literature

  • Short dictionary of electrical telecommunications : published on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications; Revised edition, Bundesdruckerei Berlin, 1970, 2nd volume G – P; Pp. 1289-1290
  • Manual dictionary of the postal system : Ed. Federal Ministry for the Post and Telecommunications , 2nd completely revised edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1953, page 569 f.
  • 40 years of FTZ and PTZ in Darmstadt; Ed .: Society for German Postal History eV; Archive for German Postal History, Issue 1/1989; ISSN  0003-8989
    • Michael Reuter: "100 years of central technical offices at Post - 40 years of FTZ and PTZ in Darmstadt" ; Pp. 5-17
    • "The Presidents of the PTZ" ; Pp. 32-33
    • Günter Steinecke: "The Organization of the Central Postal Service 1949–1988" ; Pp. 30-31
    • Ulrich Theinert: "Post and Money - The Role of the PTZ in the Development of Postbank Services" ; Pp. 221-229
    • Gerhard Becker: "Contribution of the Central Postal Service to urban planning and urban development" ; Pp. 271-276
  • o. V .: »New office building of the PTZ in Darmstadt« ; In: Zeitschrift für das Post- und Fernmeldewesen, Issue 23/1962, pp. 877–879

Web links

Commons : Central Postal Service  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ PARTICIPANT ANNIVERSARY: The X day . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1957 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Concise dictionary of electrical telecommunications; 1970 Volume 2, p. 1289
  3. ↑ Handwortbuch des Postwesens, 1953, p. 137
  4. ↑ Ordinance on the transition to the offices regulated in the second law for the standardization and new regulation of salary law in the federal and state levels and on the offices that will be discontinued in the future ; Appendix 2 Overview of Section 1, Paragraph 2 (offices and official titles that will be discontinued in the future) Source of the original text: Appendix to BGBl. I 1975 No. 113
  5. ^ The Presidents of the PTZ, pp. 32–33
  6. ↑ 6000 new colleagues and no president - Unrest spreads at the FTZ: Will the Darmstadt office be relocated to Berlin? by Klaus Honold, Darmstädter Echo, Friday, November 16, 1990, p. 9