Tassilo Grimmeiß

Tassilo Grimmeiß (born February 21, 1910 in Illertissen , † June 18, 1961 in Neu-Ulm ) was a German lawyer and non-party local politician . From 1948 to 1961 he was Lord Mayor of the Bavarian-Swabian city ​​of Neu-Ulm. He is considered to be the head of the city during the reconstruction after the Second World War .

Life

Tassilo Grimmeiß was born on February 21, 1910 in Illertissen, the administrative seat of the district of the same name . His parents were the lawyer Leo Grimmeiß (1881–1940) and his wife Mathilde, b. Erhard (1887–1972). In the first years of his life the family moved to Neu-Ulm, where he grew up with three younger siblings and attended elementary school. He passed his Abitur in 1928 at the humanistic grammar school in neighboring Ulm and studied law and political science in Munich , Berlin , Kiel and Würzburg until 1932 . In Munich, Grimmeiß was a member of the Rheno-Franconia student union .

On February 23, 1932, he passed his legal traineeship examination and worked as a legal trainee at the district office , at the Neu-Ulm labor court and at the regional and higher regional courts in Munich . After the Great State examination on September 11, 1935, he first worked a short time helping out in the office of his father in Neu-Ulm and changed in December of the same year as the assessor for Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechsel-Bank in Munich. After completing his military service , Grimmeiß entered the higher army administration service and was director of the military district administrations of Hanover and Munich. During the Second World War he was in the administrative service of the Wehrmacht , most recently in 1944 in the rank of chief staff officer . Grimmeiß was taken prisoner for a short time and then returned to Neu-Ulm as an assistant judge , where he worked at the district court . He was within a short time to the magistrate and head of the local court of Ulm appointed.

Tassilo Grimmeiß's workplace from 1954: The Neu-Ulm town hall

On January 27, 1946, the first municipal council election after the end of the Second World War took place in Neu-Ulm . Grimmeiß was elected to the city ​​council as a non-party candidate . A good two years later, he also ran for the mayoral election and was elected mayor of the city of Neu-Ulm on August 16, 1948.

At the end of the war, 80 percent of Neu-Ulm's inner city had been destroyed, and there was a lack of building materials, infrastructure and manpower to rebuild. At the time Grimmeiß took office, there was not even a town hall , but he had to conduct his official business in the poorly prepared rooms of the savings bank building on the island until the new town hall built at the old location could be moved into on August 31, 1954. Tassilo Grimmeiß tirelessly promoted the reconstruction and development of the city. During his tenure, new roads, underpasses and railroad tracks, city quarters east and west of the city center and new bridges over the Danube to the neighboring city of Ulm were built. Public institutions were expanded (hospital, Ludwigsfeld elementary school) or newly built, such as the Christoph-Probst-Realschule , whose founding father Grimmeiß is considered to be. Numerous important industrial and commercial enterprises settled here, and in 1951 Neu-Ulm became a garrison of the US Army .

Honorary grave of Tassilo Grimmeiß and his wife Hedwig († 2005) in the Neu-Ulm main cemetery

After the end of his first term of office, Grimmeiß ran twice again successfully without opposing candidates: In March 1952 he was re-elected with 97.3 percent of the votes cast, and in 1958 with 98.3 percent. During his tenure, Neu-Ulm was rebuilt from rubble, and the city's population grew from 8,000 to 25,000.

Tassilo Grimmeiß was only 51 years old. He died surprisingly in the early morning hours of June 18, 1961 in his apartment and found his final resting place in a grave of honor in the Neu-Ulm main cemetery. The local sculptor Hans Bühler made his large, but simply designed tombstone.

His successor in the office of Lord Mayor was Dietrich Lang .

Honors

• Honorary grave of the city of Neu-Ulm
• Renaming of the state vocational school in Neu-Ulm to "Tassilo-Grimmeiß-Schule" (1971)

family

On June 29, 1943, Tassilo Grimmeiß married Hedwig "Hedi" Lurz (1919–2005) in Osnabrück , the daughter of a chief doctor who was born there. Between 1944 and 1953 he had two daughters and a son who, like his grandfather, became a lawyer.

literature

• Frank Raberg : Biographical Lexicon for Ulm and Neu-Ulm 1802-2009 . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft im Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7995-8040-3 , p. 130-131 .
• Gerrit-R. Ranft: He was the mayor of the Neu-Ulm reconstruction . In: Augsburger Allgemeine . June 30, 2019 ( online [accessed July 1, 2019]).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edwin Ruschitzka: A place of remembrance. In: SüdwestPresse. April 7, 2016, accessed July 3, 2019 .