Silvio Conti

Silvio Conti (born May 6, 1899 in Lugano ; † October 21, 1938 in Prenzlau ; resident in Monteggio ) was a Swiss- German lawyer and civil servant . From 1934 to 1938 he was the district administrator of Prenzlau .

Live and act

Conti was the oldest of three children of the Swiss postal worker Silvio Conti and his Leipzig- born wife Nanna Conti , née Pauli. His younger brother was the later Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti . After the parents separated in 1902, Conti's mother moved with the children to Germany, where the children were now given Prussian citizenship.

From Easter 1905 to Michaelis (≈ autumn) 1913 Conti attended the municipal Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg, then from Michaelis 1913 to Easter 1917 the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Berlin. There he passed the Abitur in the summer of 1917 . He then volunteered to take part in the First World War : On May 1, 1917, he joined the Imperial Navy, where he trained as a naval pilot until November 1918. At the end of the war, Conti resigned from the army on November 29, 1918 as a pilot-chief seaman in the naval land aviation department. Instead, he joined the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division , with which he participated in the fight against the socialist unrest that broke out in the Berlin area in the wake of the German defeat in the war, as well as communist uprisings in Leipzig.

From 1918 to 1921 Conti studied law and economics for seven semesters at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . As a leading member of the Deutsche Finkenschaft and the Berlin University Ring Deutscher Art , he and his brother were one of the most active exponents of the nationalist student movement. After he had passed the First State Examination in Law at the Court of Appeal on November 24, 1921, he was accepted into the legal preparatory service as a trainee lawyer. In the following years he went through the usual stations in order to prepare for the legal profession. He completed his preparatory service in 1926 with the second state examination in law, which he also passed with the rating “good”. He also received his doctorate in 1925 with a thesis on the Prussian student body for Dr. jur.

After completing his legal preparatory service, Conti left the civil service on January 31, 1927 to switch to the oil industry: From 1927 to 1933 he headed the legal department of the OLEX company , where he also served as an authorized signatory from 1930 . He also ran a small law firm in Berlin.

After the National Socialists came to power , Conti was appointed provisional district administrator of Ostprignitz on May 4, 1933 . On August 3rd of the same year he took over the management of the district administrator of Prenzlau, succeeding the conservative Kurt von Lettow-Vorbeck . On January 18, 1934, he was appointed as a regular district administrator . He held this office until his death in 1938. In the initial phase, his term of office was marked by the purge of civil servants in the district administration and the positions under it of political opponents of the Nazi system. Since 1933, but increasingly since 1936, Conti was involved in ongoing and sharp arguments with the Brandenburg Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube and his employees. Conti was a member of the " Fliegersturm " and a squad leader in the SS . He belonged to the NSDAP . He was also a member of the Association of National Socialist German Lawyers (BNSDJ) .

After Conti had been on leave since the spring of 1938 due to health-related reasons - he suffered from a chronic gastrointestinal disease - and was on leave, he committed suicide in October 1938 due to his hopeless state of health by going to the Back of the head shot. His wife Luise (1904–1945), with whom he had been married since 1931, shot the dying man and thus hastened his death. She later said she did this to shorten his torment. She was sentenced to one year in prison for manslaughter . It is unclear whether the sentence was actually carried out. Luise Conti was granted the widow's pension. By order of the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP), Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich was not allowed to report in the press about Conti's suicide .

Fonts

• Prussian student law , Charlottenburg 1925.
• The Prussian state-recognized student body , 1925. (Dissertation)
• State and city constitution. Lecture given at the Berlin State Medical Academy on November 7th and 14th, 1933 , Leipzig 1934.

literature

• Christian Goeschel: Suicide in Nazi Germany , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, especially p. 70.
• Klaus Neitmann / Winfried Schich (eds.): History of the city of Prenzlau , (= individual publications of the Brandenburg Historical Commission, Volume 16) Horb am Neckar 2009. ISBN 978-3-86595-290-5 .
• Bärbel Holtz, The Protocols of the Prussian State Ministry , Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2001 (Acta borussica Volume 12 / II) ISBN 3-487-12704-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Silvio Conti in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Silvio Conti in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Grüttner u. a., The Berlin University between the World Wars 1918–1945 (History of the University of Unter den Linden, Vol. 2), Berlin 2012, Akademie Verlag, p. 210.
2. ↑ Dorte Schmeissner: Dr. Silvio Conti. Protection came from the highest level. The district administrators of Ostprignitz  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Märkische Allgemeine , October 16, 2001.  
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Bärbel Holtz: The Protocols of the Prussian State Ministry , 2001, p. 542.
4. ↑ Klaus Neitmann / Winfried Schich (eds.): Geschichte der Stadt Prenzlau , Horb am Neckar 2009, p. 249.
5. ^ Anja Katharina Peters: Nanna Conti (1881–1951). A biography of the Reich midwife leader. LIT Verlag, Berlin and Münster 2018, ISBN 978-3-643-13985-6 , pp. 82–86.