Rudolf Wolters
Rudolf Wolters (born August 3, 1903 in Coesfeld ; † January 7, 1983 ) was a German architect and town planner . He belonged to the authority under Albert Speer General Building Inspector for the Reich capital and the workforce for the reconstruction of cities destroyed by bombs .
childhood and education
Wolters was the son of Coesfeld town planning officer Hermann Wolters (1868–1951). His paternal uncle was Carl Wilhelm Wolters (1878–1954), 1945 mayor of the city of Coesfeld. His maternal uncle was Peter Klöckner (1863-1940), the founder of the Klöckner-Werke .
Wolters first studied architecture in Munich in 1923, where he met Albert Speer and Friedrich Tamms . Together they moved to the Technical University of Berlin in 1924 . There Wolters was accepted into Heinrich Tessenow's class and graduated in 1927 with a diploma. He then worked in Tessenow's private studio and was awarded a doctorate in 1929 with his dissertation “From the layout of the reception buildings of large long-distance stations”. PhD . From May 1932 to early summer 1933 Wolters worked for the urban planning department of the Siberian Railways in the Soviet Novosibirsk . He then worked for Albert Speer . In November 1933 he became active in the planning department of the Reichsbahn through job creation measures. He also took on assignments from Albert Speer as a freelance architect.
Functions during National Socialism
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In 1937, Speer made Wolters head of Dept. I.3 in Main Office I (planning department) in his authority General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital (GBI). Wolters was responsible for the north-south axis , transport rings and museums as part of the Germania planning . This included the attraction of the Round Square , for which Arno Breker designed the mythological Apollo Fountain on behalf of Hitler . In his function as press officer for the general building inspector, Wolters wrote essays, forewords and official announcements for Speer.
Wolters received additional tasks from Joseph Goebbels . In 1938 he appointed him editor of Baukunst , a supplement to the journal Die Kunst im Third Reich . Wolters wrote in this magazine, which in September 1939 was renamed Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich at Hitler's request , until the last issue in 1944.
In January 1940 Wolters - also by Goebbels - was appointed "Exhibition Commissioner" and entrusted with the organization of the exhibition New German Architecture . This exhibition presented models, large photos and plans of the most important buildings and construction projects of the German Reich abroad and was shown in Belgrade , Sofia , Budapest , Athens , Madrid , Barcelona , Lisbon , Copenhagen , Istanbul , Ankara and Smyrna until 1943 .
After Speer's rise to succeed Fritz Todt as Minister of Armaments and Ammunition, Wolters became the main department head for culture, press and propaganda in the Organization Todt (OT) and traveled to Russia in June and October 1942 as head of the OT war reporting squadron.
After Hitler had signed a decree on the preparation of the reconstruction of bomb-damaged cities on October 11, 1943 , Speer formed a corresponding task force and made Wolters its head on December 18 (certificate of appointment of January 1, 1944 as "Chief of the task force for the reconstruction planning of destroyed cities" ). Konstanty Gutschow was appointed as his deputy, but due to his experience and connections, he soon became the actual organizer of the task force. Damage statistics were drawn up in the task force and guidelines for reconstruction developed, some of which were adopted and implemented after 1945. A network of personal and factual relationships developed in the task force, which continued to be carefully cultivated in the years of reconstruction after the end of the regime .
At the beginning of February 1945 Wolters von Speer was also commissioned to set up post-war offices for planning prefabricated housing in Höxter , Oberursel and Flensburg . Originally he was supposed to do this together with the architect Walter Schlempp from the Schlempp construction group, which is compulsory for the GBI. Since this was not available because of other obligations, the deputy head of the Schlempp engineering office, who later became Minister of Agriculture and Federal President Heinrich Lübke , took on this task.
After the war
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In May 1945 Wolters returned to his hometown Coesfeld and was immediately entrusted by the newly appointed city administration with the planning for the reconstruction of the old town. To this end, he founded an office community with Karl Berlitz , whose advisor was Karl Maria Hettlage , former head of the Office for Economics and Finance of the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production . Later the office also worked for other Westphalian cities such as Ahaus , Anholt , Borken and Rheine .
Post-war buildings by Wolters can be found in Dortmund (police headquarters), Düsseldorf ( Industrie-Kredit-Bank building ) and Bonn ( Hotel Königshof ). Rudolf Wolters handed over his office to Johannes and Marlene Eggers.
Anholter meeting
From Coesfeld, Wolters soon tried to get in touch with his former colleagues from the General Building Inspector and the Task Force for the Reconstruction of the Bombed Cities , and explored their whereabouts. In 1946, the Nazi past seemed to be long gone and survived without major wounds. With a view to Germany's future - and its own - future developments should now be influenced and key positions should be filled.
The people who came together on Wolters 'and Tamms' initiative were later named " Anholter Kreis " after the place where they first met . The rooms at Anholt Castle were made available to them by Nikolaus Leopold Heinrich zu Salm-Salm .
The first of these meetings took place from August 23-25, 1947. Participants were Rudolf Wolters, Karl Berlitz, Friedrich Tamms, Ernst Neufert , Konstanty Gutschow and Friedrich Hetzelt . Reinhold Niemeyer and Herbert Rimpl had also agreed to attend, but did not appear.
In August 1949 they met for the second time, this time in Coesfeld, where Wolters lived. In addition to the participants at Anholt Castle, Karl Maria Hettlage, Hanns Dustmann and Reinhold Niemeyer also took part in this meeting .
In 1950, a third meeting took place again at Anholt Castle. Participants were again Wolters, Berlitz, Tamms, Gutschow, Neufert, Hetzelt, Niemeyer and Dustmann, and Wilhelm Hübotter was a new addition . At these meetings, it was agreed to support Speer, who has been incarcerated in the Spandau war crimes prison since the Nuremberg trials .
Later relationship with Albert Speer
Wolters collected Speer's receipts from the Spandau war crimes prison. The Kassiber were the basis for Speer's books Memories and Spandau Diaries . Speer's family was supported by a so-called "school money fund" into which a group of friends organized by Wolters (including Walter Rohland, Karl Maria Hettlage and Friedrich Tamms) paid. After Speer's release from prison in 1966, there were differences between the friends and in 1971 there was a break. Wolters, who had remained a Hitler fanatic for life, accused Speer of betraying his former comrades-in-arms in Nuremberg. The final break in deep contempt came when Wolters, who did not speak English, read excerpts from an extensive interview conducted in 1971 by journalist Eric Norden for Playboy magazine in German translation in Quick magazine . As a chronicler Speers, Wolters again reached public attention in the 1980s. Wolters had written a chronicle of the Speer offices since 1941 , which ultimately documented Speer's deep involvement in the Nazi regime and his involvement in the evictions of Jews in Berlin. The path of this chronicle, which has since been falsified and thus relieved Speer, was traced by the historian Matthias Schmidt . In 1980 Wolters Schmidt drew attention to original documents and Speer's forgeries. Speer, however, had previously referred Schmidt to Wolters himself.
In the film series Speer and Er , Wolters' role in Speer's staff and the increasingly poor relationship between Speer and Wolters are discussed. He is described there as a nationalist who ignored the crimes and negative consequences of National Socialism and instead emphasized the positive achievements. He never made a final break with the Nazi era, but instead showed his sympathy for National Socialism through devotional objects like a picture of Hitler in the bedroom. On the other hand, he was not a fanatical Nazi, as he was in a relationship with a woman whose close relatives were persecuted by the Nazis as Jews. A positive trait was that he stood by Albert Speer and his family as a loyal friend during the 20 years of imprisonment. It was all the more disappointing for him that Speer later showed no gratitude and spoke badly about the leading Nazis. In the fourth part of the film series, an accompanying documentary, his son Friedrich Wolters (* 1942) also has a say. He often speaks of his father in a distant manner as "Rudolf Wolters" and, in the further course of the conversation, indicates that there was a falling out because of his father's attitude. He handed over his father's estate to the Berlin State Archives.
Rudolf Wolters died of cancer on January 7, 1983 after a long illness. He is buried in Berlin.
Fonts
- From the ground plan of the reception buildings of large long-distance train stations . Berlin 1930.
- Specialist in Siberia . Wendt and Matthes publishing house, Berlin 1933.
- New German architecture . Volk und Reich publishing house, Berlin 1940.
- Albert Speer . Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg 1943.
- From the job of the builder. From artistic struggle and confession . Volk und Reich publishing house, Berlin 1944.
- Coesfeld. Questions and answers from a town planner (= contributions to regional and folklore of the Coesfeld district. Issue 14). Coesfeld 1974.
- Stadtmitte Berlin: urban development phases from the beginnings to the present . Wasmuth-Verlag, Tübingen 1978.
literature
- Matthias Schmidt : Albert Speer. The end of a myth. Goldmann, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-442-11354-7 .
- Werner Durth : German Architects. Biographical entanglements 1900–1970 Krämer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7828-1141-0 .
- Jörn Düwel : New Cities for Stalin: A German Architect in the Soviet Union 1932–1933 . DOM Publishers, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86922-380-3 .
- Jörn Düwel / Niels Gutschow: Architecture and National Socialism. Demonstration of power in Europe, 1940–1943. The exhibition New German Architecture by Rudolf Wolters . DOM Publishers, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86922-026-0 .
- André Deschan: In the shadow of Albert Speer. The architect Rudolf Wolters . Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-7861-2743-7 .
- Fritz Wolters [family of architects from Coesfeld]. In: Bauwelt. 75, 1984, pp. 670-671.
- Heinrich Breloer : Speer and He . TV documentary game in four episodes.
- Stephan Krass: The spearman . Radio play with Matthias Brandt and Caroline Junghanns, swr edition 2016
Web links
- Literature by and about Rudolf Wolters in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ^ Archive of the "Arno Breker Society 1979 eV" / Museum of European Art
- ↑ Susanna Schrafstetter: persecution and reparation. Karl M. Hettlage: Employee of Albert Speer and State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Finance. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 3/2008, p. 431 ff., P. 466 (PDF; 419.89 kB).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wolters, Rudolf |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German architect and urban planner |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 3, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Coesfeld |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 7, 1983 |