Rudolf children

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Rudolf Kinder ( lit. Rudolfas Kinderis , born February 17, 1881 in Prenen , † March 13, 1944 in East Prussia ) was a politician of the German minority in the Lithuanian capital Kaunas .

The deputies of the Seimas in 1926

Life

Rudolf Kinder worked as an inspector of the municipal hospital in Kaunas from 1905, became a member of the city council in Kaunas and was active there on the school commission and the finance committee. Kinder was also temporarily chairman of the board of the German Evangelical Lutheran Consistory , in which the German-speaking population organized itself in a Catholic, Russian-Orthodox and Jewish environment. In the German secondary school, too, Kinder was chairman of the school association.

MP

As a founding member of the party of the Germans of Lithuania , he was elected to the "Constituent Assembly of Lithuania" in 1920. In 1923 and 1926, children were elected to the Lithuanian Seimas , the Lithuanian parliament. 1,925 children were threatened, although the Parliament to reconcile mandate and public office had decided him from his Beamtenpositon in the hospital to remove when he had brought a school bill to fall in the Seimas, which made the Lithuanian in the private schools to the first language of instruction should be. This was one aspect of the conflict-ridden coexistence of the Lithuanian majority population with the non-Lithuanian minorities, alongside the Germans, a Russian, Polish and Jewish. In connection with the “Litauische Rundschau”, Kinder published a paper “Der Wächter” in 1926, but both newspapers were read more by the Jewish and German dignitaries in Kaunas and by the diplomatic corps than by the agrarian German-Lithuanian population.

For the parliamentary elections in 1923 and 1926, the "Party of the Germans of Lithuania" entered into an alliance of votes with parties of the Jews and Russians. After the parliamentary elections in 1926, Kinder joined the “Memelland-German Fraction”, which thus had six of 85 mandates, which was a “going together on the defensive”. The political problems and goals of the Memelland and the German-Lithuanians were not identical. Kinder was elected First Secretary in the Seimas Bureau in the parliament, which was politically completely fragmented . The government of Kazys Grinius , supported by the German minority , was " swept away by the fascist coup d'état" on December 17, 1926 , Antanas Smetona became president of an authoritarian regime, appointed Augustinas Voldemaras prime minister and gave parliament leave to dissolve on April 12, 1927 without replacement . Since the parties were hindered in their work, the party of the Germans of Lithuania was removed from the register of associations in the summer of 1935 due to inaction. The further work now concentrated on the association Deutsche Oberrealschule, which Kinder had founded in 1920, and the resulting "Cultural Association of the Germans of Lithuania", for whose upswing the chairman children ensured.

School fight

The ten German elementary schools and the grammar school at the best of times (1927) were nominally funded by the parents' school fees and by the German Cultural Association, but the German envoy in Kaunas, Hans Ludwig Moraht , made it clear: “In reality, the schools have so far been almost exclusively open Funds of the Foreign Office have been maintained ”.

With a new passport law, the nationalist Lithuanian politics tried to restrict the options of the national minorities and to limit their schools to the members of the respective language group in order to dry them out completely. Under the pressure of this Lithuanization , the German Cultural Association expected a relaxation of the Lithuanian-German trade agreement concluded by Gustav Stresemann and Augustinas Voldemaras in January 1928. Even when children and the former Seimas deputy August Rogall came to the Foreign Office in Berlin in December 1930, the action against the League of Nations did not materialize. On April 14, 1931, Kinder and Rogall spoke to the Lithuanian Prime Minister Juozas Tūbelis , and in May to President Smetona. Due to the lack of success in negotiations, Kinder withdrew from the board of the cultural association in September 1931, especially since there had been personal disputes and the representatives of the German embassy supported the anti-children sentiment.

In the political disputes, Rudolf Kinder also used ethnic and racist arguments and in November 1932 found “too many Jewish and non-German children” in the German school in Kaunas. Employees of the Association for Germanness Abroad (VDA) stopped the school because of the “Foreign infiltration” even for “unsuitable for the education of a consciously German leadership class”, actually forty percent of the approx. 500 pupils were Jewish before 1933 - which made the school economically viable.

Relocation

In the winter of 1940/1941, the "Cultural Association of the Germans of Lithuania" was responsible for the preparation of the resettlement of the approx. 50,000 German-Lithuanians who had signed the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty signed on September 28, 1939 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact had been agreed - just like that of the other Baltic Germans. According to the treaty, Lithuania fell into the Soviet sphere and was occupied on June 15, 1940. After the dissolution of the cultural association on January 23, 1941, the representatives of the cultural association were involved as resettlement officers in the resettlement campaign led by Heinz Brückner from the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle , the resettlement part of which was reported to have been completed on May 5, 1941. At that time, children were no longer in a leading position in the cultural association and in the resettlement campaign in 1940 only mentioned in a footnote on the socio-medical aspects: The Germans should not forget their compatriots in the Kalvarija psychiatric institution .

No information is available about Kinder's activities in the 1930s and 1940s, including whether Kinder was resettled in 1941 after the German attack on the Soviet Union . Although it was disputed at all among the National Socialists whether Lithuania would even come into question as a German settlement area and whether the German-Lithuanians would be suitable for Germanic settlement in the border region , in 1942 and 1943 a significant part (20,000) is under the leadership of the Reichskommissariat Ostland as "Heralds of a comprehensive German colonization" have been resettled.

As a German with diverse professional and political contacts to political representatives of the Lithuanian Jews, he did not escape the ghettoization and murder of the Jews in Kaunas after 1941 . The majority of the Jews in Lithuania, not just the Jewish students and graduates of the “German Gymnasium Kaunas”, became victims of the Holocaust . He also did not escape when the universities in Vilnius and Kaunas were closed and members of the Lithuanian intelligentsia were brought to the Stutthof concentration camp .

Kinder died five months before Kaunas was evacuated by the German Wehrmacht on July 6, 1944 , the mass exodus , during which the Gauleitung showed itself to be headless, had already started.

In Salzgitter Lebenstedt a majority of the 14,000 Germans of the Federal Republic of Lithuania collected. There the “Rudolf Children's Ring” was named after him.

literature

  • Fritz Wertheimer : From German parties and party leaders abroad , Berlin, Zentral-Verlag 1927
  • Harry Stossun: The Deutsche Oberrealschule or the German Gymnasium in Kaunas , Annaberger Annalen 11, 2003 ( PDF )
  • Harry Stossun: History of the German school system in Lithuania , Annaberger Annalen 9, 2001 [2]
  • Harry Stossun: The resettlement of Germans from Lithuania during the Second World War: Investigations into the fate of a German ethnic group in the East , Marburg / Lahn: JG Herder Institute 1993 ISBN 3-87969-231-9
  • Harry Stossun: The Resettlement of the Lithuanian Germans (1942–1944) , Annaberger Annalen 5, 1997 ( PDF )
  • Gustav Wagner: The Germans in Lithuania, their cultural and economic communities between the two world wars , Marburg / Lahn, 1959. Scientific contributions to the history and regional studies of Eastern Central Europe. The doctoral thesis was submitted to the Albertina Königsberg in 1943 .
  • Rudolf Heberle : The Germans in Lithuania , abroad a. Heimat, Stuttgart 1927. Writings of the German Institute for International Affairs Stuttgart
  • Richard Lynn Himmel: Years of crisis diplomacy: German-Lithuanian relations, 1933–1939 . MA, Texas Tech University. 1975 ( PDF )
  • Christoph Dieckmann : Plan and Practice. German settlement policy in occupied Lithuania 1941–1944 , in: Isabel Heinemann, Patrick Wagner (eds.), Wissenschaft, planning, Praxis. Reorganization Concepts and Resettlement Policy under National Socialism , Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, p. 93-118.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information up to 1926 in Wertheimer, pp. 68–75
  2. ^ The "Higher German Realschule" was founded on August 7, 1920 and in 1930 became a grammar school
  3. ↑ in Wagner (1943/199), p. 119f “removed”. In Stossun, Schulwesen (2001), p. 110 "threatened"
  4. ↑ Heberle, 136
  5. ^ Heberle, The Germans in Lithuania p. 137. One representative was the member of the Memelland People's Party and Memel Mayor Robert Grabow
  6. ↑ "25 lists were drawn up throughout the state !!", Rudolf Heberle, Die Deutschen in Litauen , p. 118 (emphasis placed by the author)
  7. ^ Wertheimer, political parties and party leaders abroad, p. 75; see also en: 1926 Lithuanian coup d'état
  8. ↑ Silvio Broedrich was initially deputy in the school association ; see. Kurt Ammon:  Broedrich, Silvio. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 628 f. ( Digitized version ).
  9. ↑ there were also ten state schools, see: Stossun, Schulwesen , p. 73
  10. ↑ Hans Ludwig Moraht, envoy to Lithuania October 18, 1926 to January 1933, then Erich Zechlin (February 14, 1933 - June 1940)
  11. ↑ Moraht on April 14, 1929, in: Stossun, Schulwesen , p. 86
  12. ↑ The question of the German minority in Lithuania and the Memel question were of secondary importance for Stresemann, see: Julius P. Slavenas, Stresemann and Lithuania in the Nineteen Twenties , Lituanus, Volume 18, No. 4, winter 1972 [1]
  13. ^ August Rogall (1880-1941), Seimas deputy 1923-1926, see: Polish Wikipedia pl: August Rogall
  14. ↑ Stossun, Schulwesen , pp. 123f
  15. ↑ On the Lithuanian groups see also: Iron Wolf
  16. ↑ Quotations at: Stossun, the German secondary school , p 220
  17. ↑ a b Stossun, Die Umsiedlungen , p. 102
  18. ↑ Stossun Stossun, education , p.9
  19. ↑ Stossun, The Resettlement , p. 97
personal data
SURNAME Children, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kinderis, Rudolfas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Lithuanian politician
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Prenen
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1944
Place of death East Prussia