Theodor Habicht

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Theodor Habicht (1933)

Theodor August Otto Wilhelm Habicht (born April 4, 1898 in Wiesbaden , † January 31, 1944 in Newel (Pskow) ) was a German politician (NSDAP) . He was Lord Mayor of Wittenberg from 1937 to 1938 and of Koblenz in 1939, as well as a member of the Reichstag . Habicht is considered to be the most important mastermind behind the July coup of the Vienna SS Standard 89, in which the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was murdered on July 25, 1934.

Life

Habicht, the son of a typesetter, switched to the reformed secondary school there in 1908 after attending secondary school in Wiesbaden. In 1910 he moved with his parents to Berlin , in September 1914 he graduated from secondary school and began commercial training.

On November 2, 1915, Habicht volunteered for the military at the age of 17, where he came to the 74 Field Artillery Regiment, which was transferred to the Western Front in February 1916 . In February 1917 he was transferred to the Field Artillery Regiment 500 in Italy, where he had an accident in December 1917. He healed his injuries in the hospital by January 1918 and was then transferred to the Foot Artillery Regiment 129 on the Western Front. As a result of the demobilization on January 4, 1919, he returned to Berlin as a lieutenant in the reserve, awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class , where he got to know German nationalist ideas, and returned to Wiesbaden in 1920/21. There he became a commercial employee and married Margarethe Meyer on May 20, 1922. He then led a bourgeois life and became department head for perfume items in a department store.

Habicht was initially a Marxist and a member of the Communist Party , but on July 29, 1926, Habicht joined the NSDAP . In April 1927 he became deputy local group leader of the NSDAP in Wiesbaden. In July 1927 Habicht founded the weekly newspaper Nassauer Beobachter and gave up his commercial position. Habicht founded the Palatinate observer in December 1927 as an offshoot of the Nassau observer ; the paper became the official organ of the Gau. Habicht was fined 200 RM for violating the press law . He justified his offense in the Nassau Observer . Habicht soon became a local group leader of the NSDAP Wiesbaden and from May 20, 1928 belonged to the city parliament of Wiesbaden. In 1930 Habicht moved into the Hesse-Nassau provincial assembly and was also represented in the Nassau Evangelical Church Assembly. Due to internal party disputes, on June 11, 1930 the name of Nassauer Observer was renamed Rheinwacht ; the newspaper filed for bankruptcy on June 20, 1931.

On July 21, 1931 Habicht first fled the consequences of bankruptcy and took on the task of building up the NSDAP in Austria as a provincial inspector. With the entry into the German Reichstag on September 16, 1931, Habicht fell under the immunity regime for parliamentarians. At the request of Adolf Hitler , Habicht continued his work in Austria. The resignation of the then Austrian Chancellor Karl Buresch was counted as a success for Habicht. After an attack on Richard Steidle by German National Socialists on June 11, 1933, Habicht was expelled from the country. After the defeated February uprising of the Social Democrats, Habicht supported Richard Bernaschek, who escaped from prison with National Socialist help and fled to Germany . Buresch's successor, Engelbert Dollfuß , tried to prevent the growing power of the National Socialists by making cuts. Thereupon the plan was made to get rid of Dollfuss. The assassination attempt succeeded, but the National Socialist coup failed. Habicht was removed from his National Socialist offices, fell out of favor with Hitler and initially disappeared into oblivion.

In 1936 the main office for local politics at the Reich leadership of the NSDAP was interested in taking over Habicht in local services. He subsequently became mayor in Wittenberg. In 1938, during his tenure, the communities of Teuchel and Labetz were attached. Wittenberg received the ministerial approval for the decision of the municipal authorities in 1922 that Wittenberg should officially bear the name "Lutherstadt Wittenberg".

At the urging of the Upper President of the Rhine Province Josef Terboven and Gauleiter Gustav Simon , the Koblenz Mayor Otto Wittgen had to retire on March 20, 1939. The NSDAP appointed Habicht as his successor, who had been in office since July 4, 1939. After his mobilization took place on August 27, he joined the Wehrmacht .

In the Wehrmacht Habicht first came to the 1st Field Replacement Battalion, Division 14 in Oschatz / Saxony. Although he was given leave of absence in October 1939 in order to be able to accept the office of Lord Mayor in Koblenz, he did not do so.In the autumn of 1939 he applied for a position in the Foreign Office in Berlin, where he was appointed Undersecretary of State by Adolf Hitler and Head of Information, Press and Broadcasting Department has been appointed. The Koblenz residents then terminated his employment as Lord Mayor in December 1939.

In September 1940 Habicht returned to the military, where he was assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment. He was wounded in combat operations near the Pola River on September 12, 1941. He cured these injuries in the reserve hospital III in Königsberg, the reserve hospital 123 Berlin-Zehlendorf and the reserve hospital in Bad Reichenhall until December 4, 1941. In the spring of 1942 he returned to the fighting force as a company commander, was promoted to captain in February 1943 and received the Iron Cross 1st class. He was sent to the battalion leader course in autumn 1943 and took over the post of battalion commander in the 83rd Infantry Division on November 25, 1943 .

During combat operations of this division Habicht fell on January 31, 1944, probably in the area around Newel. The promotion to major was posthumous .

literature

  • Ronny Kabus: Jews of Lutherstadt Wittenberg in the III. Rich . Exhibition for the State Center for Political Education Saxony-Anhalt and the Luther Center e. V. in the Lutherstadt Wittenberg in 2003. After an exhibition in the Lutherhalle Wittenberg from 1988. Drei-Kastanien-Verlag, Wittenberg 2003, ISBN 3-933028-75-2 . . 3rd revised and expanded edition BoD Norderstedt 2012. ISBN 978-3-8448-0249-8
  • Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger : Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871-1945 . G – K. Ed .: Foreign Office - Historical Service. tape 2 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2005, ISBN 3-506-71841-X .
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Heinrich Kühne : Incorporation of Teuchel and Labetz . In: Heinrich Kühne tells Wittenberg stories . Part 3. Fläming-Verlag, Kropstädt 1994.
  • Hans Schafranek : Summer party with prize shooting . The unknown history of the Nazi putsch in July 1934. Czernin, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7076-0081-5 .
  • Wolfgang Schütz: Koblenz heads. People of the city's history . Namesake for streets and squares. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Publishing house for advertising papers GmbH, Mülheim-Kärlich 2005.
  • Stephanie Zibell: Lord Mayor Theodor Habicht - Career of a National Socialist . In: Koblenz contributions to history and culture . NF 9/10 (1999/2000), ISSN  1617-7053 , p. 72-100 .
  • Felix Römer : The narcissistic national community. Theodor Habicht's fight 1914 to 1944 . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3-10-397284-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gottfried-Karl Kindermann : Austria against Hitler. Europe's first defensive front 1933–1938 . Langen Müller, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-7844-2821-5 , pp. 40 .
  2. ^ Gerhard Jagschitz : The Putsch: The National Socialists 1934 in Austria . Styria, Graz 1976, ISBN 3-222-10884-6 , pp. 24 .
  3. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer : The great stories of politics: political culture and parties in Austria from the turn of the century to 1945 (= Robert Kriechbaumer, Hubert Weinberger, Franz Schausberger [Hrsg.]: Series of publications of the research institute for political-historical studies of the Dr. Haslauer library . band 12 ). Böhlau, Vienna 2001, ISBN 978-3-205-99400-8 , p. 695 .
personal data
SURNAME Habicht, Theodore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Habicht, Theo; Habicht, Theodor August Otto Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 1944
Place of death Newel