Udo Klausa

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Udo Klausa (born October 9, 1910 in Allenstein ; † July 23, 1998 in Königswinter- Ittenbach ) was district administrator of the Bendsburg district in occupied Poland during the Nazi era and, from 1954, first regional director of the Rhineland Regional Council .

Life

Youth and school days

Udo Klausa was born as the son of the later district administrator of Leobschütz and Strehlen , Dr. Walter Klausa was born in East Prussia and spent his childhood in Upper Silesia . Even as a schoolboy he was a nationalist and in 1925 he joined the illegal military sports club Black Reichswehr . After graduating from high school in 1929, he studied law and political science in Grenoble , Paris and Breslau .

The years 1930 to 1945

As a young lawyer Klausa was at the beginning of the thirties in which the Nazi propaganda as Cairo Jews process labeled methods in the wake of Friedrich Grimm consultant for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Comparative and International Private Law . The core of the process was the question of whether a Jew living in Egypt could feel offended by a brochure about the Jewish question in Germany; the lawsuit was dismissed in two instances. The Nazi press under the leadership of Wolfgang Diewerges gave this process a lot of space and celebrated the outcome based on the justification of the German reports as a great victory over Judaism.

In the course of the strengthening and the transfer of power to the National Socialists , Klausa, who, according to his own statements, had previously been a voter for the Catholic Center Party , hoped for an upswing after the fall of the Weimar Republic ; At the end of 1932 he joined the SA and in February 1933 the NSDAP (membership number 1941466).

In 1934 he began his administrative career as a government trainee. As a practicing Catholic he (according to his own statement after the end of the war) saw no future for himself in the administration and switched to the Wehrmacht , but had to resign after a few months for health reasons.

After the annexation of the Sudetenland, he worked from the end of 1938 in the Aussig district office , from where, among other things, the November pogroms of 1938 , during which the Aussig synagogue was destroyed, were monitored. After the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939, he became an employee of the military command in Posen, responsible for establishing a German administration in the so-called Reichsgau Wartheland .

In 1940 he was appointed provisional district administrator of the Bendsburg ( Bendzin ) district in annexed (that is, Eastern Upper Silesia, which was added to the League of Nations in 1922 ) ; from May 1942 he held the office regularly. During this time the German occupiers established a ghetto in Bendsburg / Bendzin and carried out resettlements using force.

Several times during this time he evaded military service at the front, as the brutal occupation policy of the SS , in which the administration was also involved, according to his own statements, was becoming increasingly stressful for him.

With effect from December 1, 1942 - against the resistance of the superior authority - he finally left the Wehrmacht. Whether this permanent departure was connected to the deportation of around 15,000 Jews from Bendzin in August 1942, which he witnessed, cannot be verified beyond doubt based on contradicting statements and documents.

Before that, he said he hid a Jewish employee and his family for several days in his private home, the Aryanized Villa Schein ; however, his information on this matter can only be brought into an inadequate context with documents.

He belonged to the 9th Infantry Regiment , later to the 26th Panzer Division , temporarily as a captain of an army anti-aircraft cartillery replacement division in Ohrdruf .

The time after the Second World War

After the end of the Second World War , Klausa and his family relocated to West Germany, where he continued his administrative career after a few years after he had unexpectedly survived denazification , as his wife noted in a private letter. In 1951 he was initially deputy and shortly afterwards responsible manager of the North Rhine-Westphalian district council . Meanwhile joined the CDU , he was elected on May 19, 1954 by the Rhineland Regional Assembly as the first state director of the Rhineland Regional Association (LVR) formed in 1953 from the former Rhineland Provincial Association . He held this office until his retirement on October 31, 1975.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the central office of the state justice administration investigated Udo Klausa in order to investigate Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg. The investigation focused on the shooting of 32 innocent civilians in Klausa's district in June 1940.

As a member of the executive board of the administrative board of Westdeutsche Landesbank WestLB , he helped save the head of the chairman of the board, Ludwig Poullain , who had gambled away 270 million D-Marks in foreign exchange deals (almost the entire annual profit for 1973) by hiring his foreign director Helmut Lipfert at the age of 49 retired well cared for, once more in connection with the bankruptcy of the Herstatt Bank .

From 1973 to 1983 he was President of the German Homeland Federation .

Klausa was married to Alexandra Klausa, née von Schweinitz , co-founder of the North Rhine-Westphalia regional association of Lebenshilfe and ditto there on the federal executive board from 1962 to 1965; The vocational college for curative education nurses of Lebenshilfe NRW in Hürth , which opened in 1996, was named after her . The marriage had five children, including the author and lecturer Ekkehard Klausa .

Publications

In 1936, Klausa published his legal-philosophical study of race and military law , the elaboration of a lecture he had given in the Berlin working group of young lawyers. In it, he describes the basics of military law with National Socialist characteristics based on the legal theory of racial law.

After 1945, Klausa occupied himself in his other publications (1954 Our districts. Ed. By the North Rhine-Westphalian district assembly; 1963 The administrative planning game . Ed. By the municipal community center for administrative simplification; 1965 Progressive administration. Ed. By the Federal Office of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany) with questions of administrative work and simplification.

Awards

On January 23, 1964, Klausa was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf with reference to his services to psychiatry . (Note: the Rector of the Medical Academy at that time was Anton Kiesselbach , Director of the Friedrich Panse Psychiatric Clinic .)

On February 24, 1965, he received the Commander's Cross of the Order of the British Empire ( Honorary Commander of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire ) for his services to the German-English youth exchange .

Since July 12, 1968, Dr. hc Udo Klausa is also an honorary citizen of the University of Bonn . In a resolution passed by the Senate of the University of Bonn on June 21, 2018, it distanced itself from the university honor and referred to Klausa's role as a NSDAP member in leading administrative activities in occupied Poland.

Reception of the person Udo Klausa

Udo Klausa's professional work is assessed ambiguously. Klausa's achievements in setting up the regional association contrasted with his work during the time of National Socialist rule. As early as the 1960s, there was occasional criticism of Klausa's Nazi past. However, Klausa's apologetic self-interpretation prevailed in the official version of the LVR and has been maintained to this day. Although he initiated a lot to humanize and modernize psychiatry in the facilities of the landscape association, the so-called Brauweiler psychiatry scandal occurred after his retirement from the service , which made clear the need for reform and began in the early 1970s.

In 2009, the Landschaftsverband Rheinland decided on a project “Processing and documenting the history of people with disabilities and mental illnesses in the facilities of the LVR” since 1945, which will run from 2010 to 2012. It is also intended to scientifically research the role of Klausa

“In addition, an independent historian will give the LVR the role of the former state director Dr. hc Udo Klausa, who headed the association from 1954 to 1975. The focus of the investigation are the questions to what extent his function in the Nazi regime with a correspondingly shaped image of man had an impact on his work as head of administration responsible for people with disabilities or was in contradiction to it. "

- LVR 2009.

The person Klausa was also thematized in a project at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University Hospital Düsseldorf under the leadership of Thorsten Noack.

In 2017, a biographical contribution to Udo Klausa was published in the LVR's own history portal, which also addresses the "stress history".

Fonts

  • Race and military law , Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936.
  • List of ancestors of the Klausa family (Klausa − Heidrich / Schlegel – Reuter). Crottorf, 1945.
  • Our counties. Düsseldorf: North Rhine-Westphalian District Assembly, 1954.
  • The administrative simulation game. Cologne-Marienburg: Communal joint agency for administrative simplification, 1963.
  • Manage more advanced. Bonn: Federal Office of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, 1965.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives. Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships. Oxford 2011, p. 134.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Diewerge: As a special reporter on the Cairo Jewish trial. Munich, Franz-Eher-Verlag 1936.
  3. ^ Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. Oxford 2012, p. 69
  4. ↑ See Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives. P. 158.
  5. ↑ Cf. Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. P. 76
  6. ↑ Cf. Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. P. 121ff.
  7. ↑ Cf. Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. P. 236ff.
  8. ↑ Cf. Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. P. 259ff.
  9. ↑ memory. THE TIME of January 3, 1986.
  10. ↑ Pochefolaise
  11. ↑ See Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives. P. 277f.
  12. ↑ Cf. Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. P. 105ff.
  13. ↑ Crash out of the leaning position. THE TIME, 1974
  14. ↑ East Prussia became President of the German Homeland Federation, in: Ostpreußenblatt vol. 24, No. 46 of November 17, 1973 (PDF; 15.7 MB)
  15. ↑ Udo Klausa: Race and military law. on armeirre.blogsport.de. (PDF; 3.6 MB)
  16. ↑ LVR, Klausa estate  ( 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. (PDF; 556 kB)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.afz.lvr.de  
  17. ^ University of Bonn: Personalities.
  18. ↑ See for example that of Dr. Wolfgang Werner wrote the biography of Klausa in the finding aid of the LVR archive.  ( 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. (PDF; 556 kB)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.afz.lvr.de  
  19. ↑ Justification for template 13/1292 of the regional association, March 27, 2009 (PDF; 51 kB)
  20. ↑ Thorsten Noack (project leader), Anke Hoffstadt, Frank Sparing, Andrea zur Nieden (project manager): Third-party funded project processing and documentation of the history of people with disabilities and mental illnesses in institutions of the Rhineland Regional Council since 1945
  21. ↑ Udo Klausa (1910-1998) - biography and public perception (Thomas Roth and Uwe Kaminsky, August 28, 2017)

literature

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Klausa, Udo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German District Administrator and Country Director
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Allenstein
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1998
Place of death Ittenbach