Rudolf Haake

Hans Rudolf Haake (born October 17, 1903 in Leipzig , † April 12, 1945 in Kelbra ) was a German local politician of the NSDAP and temporarily held the post of Lord Mayor of Leipzig in 1937 and 1938/1939 .

Career

He was born the son of the Leipzig merchant Gustav Haake and passed his school leaving examination at the local public higher commercial college in 1921 . In the following two years, he learned the trade of a commercial wholesaler for Bäckereibedarf Handlungsgehilfen until 1924 he was in Leipzig as a clerk and storekeeper operates. From 1924 to 1928 he worked in his father's company in Leipzig and Kelbra.

In 1922 Haake became a member of the recently founded Leipzig local branch of the NSDAP, after a temporary ban he rejoined the party in 1925. At this time he was already intensively involved in building up the local Hitler Youth . After joining the NSDAP, he attended its speaker school , in the following years Haake was often used as an agitator of the party at meetings. In 1930 he was appointed Reich speaker in this context .

After living in Kelbra from 1926 to 1928, where he founded the local NSDAP branch, he moved back to Leipzig. Here he studied for a year at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management , and from 1928 to 1930 Haake also headed the local group in Borna . In the Leipzig municipal elections of 1929 and 1932 Haake was elected as a city councilor, in 1930 he became head of the Leipzig NSDAP office. From 1933 he was vice chairman of the city council, in the same year he was elected honorary mayor. In 1935 he was elected professional mayor and, at the same time, deputy mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler . Haake was the department head for the statistical office, the trade office, the office for armed forces affairs, the school and education office, the market hall office, the rental and city traffic office, the city health office and the employment office.

After the National Socialists came to power in the German Reich , Haake embodied the policy of harmonization in Leipzig's city administration like no other . After the mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler was appointed Reich Commissioner for Price Formation in 1934, he took advantage of Goerdeler's frequent absence to undermine his communal political course, which had distanced itself from the NSDAP, and in some cases openly sabotage it. In November 1936, during Goerdeler's trip abroad, the Mendelssohn memorial for the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was demolished at his instigation . Since Goerdeler was unable to enforce the rebuilding, he did not accept his re-election as Mayor of Leipzig. That is why Haake was provisional in the office of Mayor of Leipzig from January 1, 1937 until Walter Dönicke took office on October 12, 1937. After Dönicke's dismissal on October 11, 1938, Haake was reappointed provisional mayor of Leipzig. He stayed in this office until August 20, 1939. Alfred Freyberg was his successor .

During Haake's term of office, the establishment of the Leipziger Stadtwerke (1937), the 125th anniversary of the Battle of the Nations (1938), the deportation of 1,598 Leipzig Jews to Poland as part of the so-called Poland Action and the November pogroms 1938 , in which six Leipzig synagogues were destroyed including the Great Community Synagogue .

In 1943, the incumbent Mayor Freyberg raised allegations of corruption against Haake, whereupon he was dismissed from the city administration and moved with his family to Kelbra. Afterwards Haake was for a time the main area manager of the NSDAP in Lithuania .

On April 12, 1945, Haake, as head of the local Volkssturm , shot American soldiers from a window of the town hall in Kelbra, two of whom he injured. He was killed in the subsequent storming of the house.

He left behind his wife Gertrud, née Dreiling (1907-2000), whom he married in 1931, and seven children between the ages of three months and thirteen years.

Fonts

• The chairman of the meeting . Theodor Fritsch jun., Leipzig 1931.
• The Leipzig city bank scandal. An indictment of bourgeois Marxist mismanagement . NSDAP publishing house, Leipzig 1932.
• Fighters under the swastika. Novel of our time . Blömer, Leipzig 1933.
• The sounding book of the city of Leipzig . Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1935. [as editor]
• The urban trade fair and exhibition system . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1938.
• Leipzig, the city without space . Leipzig 1939.

literature

• Karin Kühling, Doris Mundus : Leipzig's ruling mayors from the 13th century to the present. Sax-Verlag, Beucha 2000, ISBN 3-934544-02-9 .
• Andreas Peschel: Rudolf Haake and the Leipzig NSDAP. In: City history. Announcements from the Leipziger Geschichtsverein e. V. (Yearbook 2009), pp. 133–152.
• Robert Giesel: Leipzig's National Socialist Lord Mayor (1937–1945). In: Leipziger Stadtgeschichte: Yearbook 2011 , Sax-Verlag, Markkleeberg 2012, ISBN 978-3867291026 , pp. 171–232.

Web links

• Andreas Peschel: Rudolf Haake (1903-1945) . In: Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (Ed.): Saxon Biography .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Robert Giesel: Leipzig's National Socialist Lord Mayor ... , p. 228