Reich headquarters for homeland service
The Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst (RfH) was an information and education authority of the German Reich that existed between 1918 and 1933 . In principle, it is the institution of the Weimar Republic, which is comparable to the Federal Center for Political Education that has existed in the Federal Republic since 1952 .
Background of the term "home service"
As Johannes Karl Richter explains in his dissertation on the RfH from 1963, the name Heimatdienst was later often the subject of misinterpretations and false assumptions. He expressly notes that the occasional derivation of the name Heimatdienst "from the area of Heimatkunde [...] is not tenable."
Instead, one must have in mind the origins of the authority in the time of the First World War , in which the syllable "Heimat" was used to separate the educational work of this institution from the educational work on the front - which was carried out by military bodies. After the war, the term Heimat was retained in order to indicate the authority's responsibility for information work in Germany - in contrast to the German information / propaganda work abroad, which was carried out by the Foreign Office .
The name component "Dienst" should be understood in the sense of "Enlightenment" or "Information / Informing" and is in the tradition of the German press and propaganda vocabulary, in which the word "Dienst" is used to describe facilities for informational or propaganda purposes can be proven to third parties long in advance: B. already in October 1914 a center for foreign service for the purposes of the foreign propaganda of the German Reich was founded.
The name Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst can thus be translated as "Reichszentrale für Inlandspropaganda" or "Reichszentrale für Inlandspaganda".
tasks
After almost three years of existence, the Reich government defined the tasks of the RfH on July 5, 1921 as follows:
- The facility serves to provide objective information on foreign policy, economic policy, social and cultural issues, not in the spirit of individual parties, but from the standpoint of the state as a whole;
- The Reich government will appoint a parliamentary advisory council;
- The groups represented on the parliamentary advisory council should be represented among the professional workers and shop stewards according to their importance in popular life.
organization
The premises of the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst were in Berlin, on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Organizationally, the authority was initially subordinate to the press office of the Reich government before it was incorporated into the Reich Chancellery on April 1, 1927 - also according to the budget . On September 17, 1932, the RfH was again subordinated to the press chief of the Reich government.
Richard Strahl acted as head of the RfH throughout its existence . In the initial phase of the authority, the workforce of the central increased to 131 employees and that of the regional departments to 250. In the years 1920 and 1921 the apparatus of the headquarters was reduced to 87 and that of the state offices to 165 people.
Well-known employees of the RfH were in addition to Strahl, his deputy Ziegler, Professor Roloff and the department heads Barth, Drege and Horwitz.
history
Foundation and initial phase (1918–1921)
The roots of the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst go back to the time of the First World War . Based on the observation that the Allies were considerably superior to the German Reich in terms of propaganda warfare, the director of the Foreign Office's intelligence department, Erhard Deutelmoser , began to deal with plans for a civil reconnaissance unit in the winter of 1917/18.
On March 1, 1918, with the approval of the then Vice Chancellor Friedrich von Payer, the Central Office for Homeland Reconnaissance (ZfH) began its work under the direction of Deutelmoser, which essentially consisted of efforts to influence the German population in line with the war policy of the German government. In the course of the summer of 1918, the name Zentrale für Heimatdienst gradually became established instead of the original name.
In the course of the reorganization of the Reich government in October 1918, the ZfH was placed under the control of State Secretary Matthias Erzberger , who let it work during the turmoil of the November Revolution that broke out soon afterwards in the sense of the Reich government now de facto led by Friedrich Ebert November 1918 - the day of the German collapse in World War I and the overthrow of the Hohenzollern Monarchy - posters in the spirit of the politics represented by Ebert and posted them in Berlin.
By resolution of the Council of People's Representatives , which had acted as a transitional government since the November Revolution, the ZfH was subordinate to the People's Representative Philipp Scheidemann in the second half of November 1918 . From December 1918 to January 1919, the ZfH was mainly responsible for the propaganda (speaker training, poster campaigns, etc.) for the Council of People's Representatives and against the Spartakusbund , which was striving for a council system . The focus of her work was in the Berlin area.
In November 1919 the authority finally got its final name when the head of the Reich Chancellery announced that the authority would henceforth operate under the name Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst (RfH). On January 1, 1920, the organization of the RfH was completed by the establishment of the German Central Publishing House, which from then on took over the supervision of its publications. As a company under private law, the Zentralverlag was owned by the RfH and hierarchically subordinated to it. The same applied to the German Photo Service, which was founded in 1922 as an offshoot.
Following an extensive debate in the Reichstag , on July 5, 1921, the Reich government officially defined the tasks of the RfH as an authority, which should essentially continue to exist until 1933 (see section “Tasks”). In order to carry out its tasks, the RfH financed numerous lectures by more or less prominent speakers (including Theodor Heuss ) and other public events at which the politics of the respective Reich government were advertised. Since August 1, 1920, the RfH also published the twice-monthly journal Heimatdienst , which, as the official organ of the RfH, carried out publicity work in the spirit of the Weimar Republic .
Dissolution and liquidation (1933)
On March 15, 1933, a few months after the National Socialists came to power , the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst was dissolved by a decree of the Reich President with effect from March 16, 1933, which means it ceased to exist as an authority on that day. The responsibilities of the RfH - as well as those of the Reichskulturwartes office, which was dissolved on the same day - were transferred to the newly founded Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda .
The organizational apparatus of the RfH was handled in the course of the summer of 1933 by the previous deputy head of the RfH, Wilhelm Ziegler , who was then taken on as a consultant in the Propaganda Ministry. The employees of Barth and Schrötter were also taken over into the service of the Propaganda Ministry, while all other employees were initially on leave and later dismissed. The former state offices of the RfH have meanwhile been replaced by the Reich Propaganda Offices, which also took over their inventory.
literature
- Johannes Karl Richter: The Reich headquarters for homeland service. History of the first political education center in Germany and investigation of its role in the Weimar Republic , 1963.
- Wolfgang Wippermann: Political Propaganda and Citizenship Education. The Reich Center for Homeland Service in the Weimar Republic , Bonn 1976.