Reinhard Boos (politician)

Reinhard Boos (born June 1, 1897 in Lörrach ; † 1979 ) was a commissioner and from April 20, 1933 to April 24, 1945 mayor of the city of Lörrach . Furthermore, until 1938 he held the post of local and honorary district group leader as well as the NSDAP's Gau intervention speaker . In the Federal Republic of Germany he was a member of the municipal council in Loerrach.

Life

Education and professional life

Boos, from a working-class family in Lörrach, completed a commercial apprenticeship in a colored weaving mill in Lörrach from 1911 to 1914. He then worked as an accountant in Schliengen until 1916 . From 1916 to 1918 Boos was a soldier in the First World War . After the end of the war he returned to Lörrach, where he was an employee of the city administration from 1918 and until 1921 and a commercial clerk at the Rheinische Kreditbank Lörrach from 1921 to 1924 . From 1924 to 1932 Boos worked as an authorized signatory in a small company in Weil.

Political activity from 1930 to 1945

On November 16, 1930 , he was elected to the city council for the first time for the NSDAP , of which he was the local group leader in Lörrach - at that time, in his civil profession, he was authorized signatory of a small hamlet company . After the National Socialist " seizure of power " he was appointed city administration commissioner by the Baden Gauleiter Robert Wagner on April 19, 1933 , because the elected German national mayor Heinrich Graser did not appear politically reliable enough. As a result, Boos played a leading role in smashing the unions and the opposition parties. Against Graser he initiated impeachment proceedings. After its successful outcome, Boos was mayor from July 19, 1933, a position for which he was not adequately qualified. In 1942, Wagner only extended Boos' term of office subject to certain conditions and, among other things, encouraged him to “tighten up his office”.

From 1938 onwards, Boos took part in the actions against the Lörrach Jews (e.g. demolition of the old synagogue that was damaged during the Reichspogromnacht , intended destruction of the old Jewish cemetery ). With regard to Switzerland, he represented a policy adapted to the general political weather situation: while in the late thirties he had pushed for the expansion of Lörrach into a “German cultural bulwark” in the triangle of three countries, from 1941 he openly called for “border adjustments”. On August 9, 1941, he wrote to the Gauleiter: "The Baden border region along the Swiss border wishes and hopes wholeheartedly that this political adjustment does not stop at the arbitrary borders of what is known as Switzerland."

On April 24, 1945 Boos personally took part in a small contingent of the Volkssturm to defend the city against the advancing French army. He was wounded in the process and then interned in France until 1947.

post war period

After his return and denazification (as a “minor offender”, since he campaigned for some persecuted people he knew personally and probably had no influence on the course of regional events at the latest from the beginning of the war), Boos succeeded in obtaining a municipal council mandate for a free one from 1959 To obtain a group of voters after he had already joined the body as a successor in the previous year. In this function he was also the parliamentary group leader, otherwise he only exposed himself to an average extent. After the war, Boos stated that, in view of the question of “Bolshevism or Germany”, as a socialist and German, he “decided in favor of Germany and the NSDAP”.

At first, Boos was not included in the portrait gallery of the mayors and lords in the Lörrach town hall . In the meantime, the local council has approved the portrait.

literature

• Gerhard Moehring : Bailiffs and Mayor of Lörrach. In: Walter Jung, Gerhard Moehring (ed.): Our Lörrach 1975. A border town in the mirror of the times. Kropf & Herz, Lörrach-Tumringen 1975, pp. 33/34.
• Hugo Ott : The time from 1918 to 1945. In: Otto Wittmann , Berthold Hänelet; City of Lörrach (Hrsg.): Lörrach: Landscape - History - Culture. Published by the city of Lörrach to commemorate the privilege granted 300 years ago on November 18, 1682. City of Lörrach, Lörrach 1983, ISBN 3-9800841-0-8 .
• Wolfgang Göckel: Loerrach in the Third Reich. Self-published, Schopfheim 1990.
• Bernd Serger, Karin A. Böttcher, Gerd R. Ueberschär (eds.): South Baden under swastika and tricolor. Contemporary witnesses report on the end of the war and the French occupation in 1945. Rombach Verlag, Freiburg (Breisgau) et al. 2006, ISBN 3-7930-5013-0 .
• Michael S. Bryant: Back into the Unmasterable Past: Southwest Germany and the Judicial Odyssey of Mayor Reinhard Boos, 1947-1949. In: Human Rights Review. Vol. 8, H. 3, 2007, ISSN  1524-8879 , pp. 199-219.
• Michael S. Bryant: Back to the unresolved past. The Lörrach pogrom of November 1938, the Reinhard Boos case and the breach of the peace trials of the post-war period . In: Working group for historical regional studies on the Upper Rhine: Minutes of the working session. - 2008, No. 477; Pp. 1-23 online; accessed on March 4, 2015
• Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators - helpers - free riders. Nazi victims from southern Baden (=  perpetrators - helpers - free riders . Band 6 ). 1st edition. Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2017, ISBN 978-3-945893-06-7 , pp. 64 ff .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hubert Bernnat: 125 years labor movement in the border region. Loerrach 1993, DNB 931992532 , p. 169.