Rudolf Paul

Rudolf Paul (born July 30, 1893 in Gera ; † February 28, 1978 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a lawyer, politician ( DDP , later SED ), Lord Mayor of Gera in 1945 and State President (Minister-President) of Thuringia from 1945 to 1947 .

Life

jurist

Rudolf Paul studied political science and law in Berlin and Leipzig from 1913 to 1914 . He did his military service in the First World War , continued his studies in Jena in 1919 and after receiving his doctorate was initially a trainee lawyer and until 1923 a court assessor . In 1924 he became a public prosecutor in Gera.

In the exercise of his office, he intended to arrest Hitler and deport him as an "annoying foreigner". To do this, he needed a criminal motion from the Reichstag, which, however, was rejected by Reich President Friedrich Ebert with the following words:

"Thank you for your interest in protecting the reputation of the Reichstag, but the dirt doesn't get to my soles."

He then gave up his office as a public prosecutor and worked as a lawyer and notary in Gera from 1924 to 1934. During this time he was a member of the DDP and its chairman in East Thuringia. After he was banned from practicing his profession and his legal license was revoked by the National Socialists , he went to Ulrichswalde near Stadtroda as a farmer . In 1938 he divorced his wife Lilly, daughter of the Gera department store owner Max Biermann . Lilly Paul moved to Berlin, was deported in 1942 because of her Jewish origins and died on January 1, 1945 in the Stutthof concentration camp .

mayor

On May 7, 1945 Paul was appointed Mayor of Gera by the American city commander and military governor , and all authorities were also subordinate to him. Until July 1945 he played a major role in the reorganization of the city of Gera. For a short time he also acted as deputy chairman of the DDP, which had not yet been re-admitted, in the “Thuringia Committee”, the pre-parliamentary advisory and control body under US occupation.

Prime Minister

On July 16, 1945, after Hermann Brill's short term in office in what was now the Soviet occupation zone, he was elected President of the State of Thuringia and on August 14, 1945, on the orders of Marshal Zhukov, he was appointed Prime Minister. High profile members of this provisional cabinet were the KPD politician Ernst Busse , 1st Vice President and responsible for police, land reform and denazification , and the CDU politician Hans Lukaschek , 3rd Vice President and head of the State Office for Agriculture and Forestry. Lukaschek replaced Max Kolter from the CDU, who was deposed as an opponent of the land reform by the SMAD , arrested and died in custody.

Paul was a staunch supporter of the so-called land reform in the Soviet occupation zone . He is convinced that in view of the unevenly distributed war damage in Germany due to bombing , displacement , etc., private property that happened to be preserved should not be inviolable. With this in mind, at the end of 1946 he also enacted exemplary socio-political legislation for displaced persons ( called resettlers in the SBZ ) for the whole of the Soviet Occupation Zone, for the redistribution of excess household items and for the leasing of garden plots. However, their successes remained limited due to the resistance in the long-established population.

In 1946 Paul obtained the return of the holdings of the Nietzsche Archives with the Soviet military administration , which had already been packed and prepared for removal.

Rudolf Paul confessed to the newly formed Democratic Party of Thuringia (later LDP) without officially joining it. At the Thuringian founding party convention in April 1946 , Paul joined the SED in order to better secure himself politically. In the state elections in 1946 he was elected to the Thuringian state parliament for the SED . Suspicious of the communists in the SED, however, he continued to depend largely on the confidence of the Soviet occupying power. After the constitution of the new Thuringian state parliament, elected in autumn 1946, he was elected Prime Minister of Thuringia in January 1947 , but received a communist deputy and "minder" in April 1947 in the SED state chairman Werner Eggerath . In the period that followed, his room for maneuver was increasingly restricted. In June 1947, Paul took part in the Munich Prime Minister's Conference, but it failed.

On September 1, 1947, he fled via West Berlin to the American zone of occupation . He was officially relieved of his office on October 9, 1947 and replaced by Eggerath.

He worked as a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main for over 30 years and co-founded the law firm Knauthe-Paul-Schmitt .

literature

• Günter Domkowsky: Lord Mayor of the City of Gera. Events - anecdotes - interesting facts. Frank, Gera 2007, ISBN 978-3-934805-31-6 .
• Klaus Brodale, Heidrun Friedemann: That was the 20th century in Gera. Wartberg-Verlag, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2002, ISBN 3-8313-1273-7 .
• Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Paul, Rudolf . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Jürgen John : The Thuringian state and minister president Rudolf Paul 1945 to 1947 - illustration and edition . Publications of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, Small Series - Volume 44, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2017, approx. 512 pages, ISBN 978-3-41210995-0 , edition part on CD-ROM (writings on his Thuringian tenure, report on his flight ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rudolf Paul: From the speech on the “City Council Meeting in the Town Hall of Gera after the shameful collapse of the Nazi government” on May 18, 1945.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Günter Domkowsky: Mayor of Gera , Verlag Dr. Frank GmbH, Gera 2007, ISBN 978-3-934805-31-6 , p. 39.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Rudolf Paul in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .