Walter Oehme

This article deals with the journalist and politician. For the Prussian Colonel, see War Resources Department .

Walter Oehme (born March 1, 1892 in Berlin ; † March 13, 1969 there ) was a German journalist and politician .

Life

From 1912 Oehme worked for the SPD , then for the USPD and the German League for Human Rights . After the outbreak of the November Revolution, he was responsible for the newspaper of the Grodno Soldiers' Council in November and December 1918 . In 1918 Oehme became secretary in the Reich Chancellery and took part in this function from December 16 to 20, 1918 as the official representative of the Reich Chancellery - together with Undersecretary Kurt Baake, Press Chief Rauscher and Friedrich Eberts ' personal assistant , Heinrich Schulz , - at the " I. Allgemeine Congress of Workers 'and Soldiers' Councils in Germany ”, the Parliament of the Revolution.

On October 16, 1919, an article by him appeared in the newspaper Freiheit : “The dying Central Council”. The dissertation on the constitutional status of the President of the Reichstag , which was wrongly attributed to him, is from a namesake. The mix-up would have serious consequences for him later.

In August 1923 he was sentenced to one year in prison by the Reichsgericht for "attempted betrayal of military secrets in unity with attempted treason", because in March 1923 he reported on the plans to form the so-called Black Reichswehr .

Until 1933 he was editor-in-chief of the " Zwölf Uhr Mittagsblatt " and after the National Socialist " seizure of power " in 1933, he was a foreign correspondent.

After May 8, 1945 Oehme was economic commissioner in Dresden - Laubegast and head of the city news office. At the beginning of June 1945 he became head of the news office at the Saxon state administration. On June 7, 1945, Oehme was elected first chairman of the newly founded Saxon Association of Journalists and Writers .

After the Lord Mayor of Görlitz died in August of that year , Walter Oehme took over the official business there. A few days after taking office, he declared the city and the district an emergency area in order to ensure the food supply. Görlitz local functionaries of the KPD and SPD, who wanted to get their own people through, intrigued against foreigners. He also came into opposition to the SPD state chairman Otto Buchwitz on the one hand and the powerful KPD interior minister of Saxony, Kurt Fischer , on the other. Oehme, who was sponsored by the Görlitz Chamber of Commerce and the Saxon state administration, was initially able to assert himself in office. On November 11, 1945, the Görlitzer Kulturbund was founded under his leadership .

At the end of November 1945, however, the Görlitz police, whose boss was one of the intrigues, staged a house search at Oehme, during which they allegedly found several bottles of alcohol previously confiscated. On December 3, 1945, he was arrested in Dresden by the NKVD and in October 1946, despite the accusation he had to refute, that he was named Gestapo officer Dr. Walther Oehme for having worked in Lodz was sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp by the Soviet military tribunal in Berlin-Karlshorst . He served the sentence until his release in 1956 in the SMT penal institution in the former and later Bautzen prison . In 1963, in one of the rare cases, he received his rehabilitation by the Supreme Court of the USSR. Despite remaining in the GDR and writing activities in the sense of the SED, the SED met him with a refusal at his request for comprehensive rehabilitation. In 1969 he died in Berlin.

Fonts

• My goal is the world revolution (= contributions to the problems of the time. Vol. 1, ZDB -ID 539411-9 ). General Secretariat for the Study of Bolshevism, Berlin 1919.
• The constitutional position of the President of the Reichstag with regard to disciplinary measures, house rules, police violence and the legal transactions that he carries out. Röhrs, Göttingen 1928, (Göttingen, University, law and political science dissertation of July 23, 1928).
• with Kurt Caro : Is “The Third Reich” coming? Rowohlt, Berlin 1930 (Unchanged reprint. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-8218-0903-5 ).
• with Kurt Caro: Schleicher's rise. A contribution to the history of the counter-revolution. Rowohlt, Berlin 1933.
• At that time in the Reich Chancellery. Memories from the years 1918/1919. Kongress-Verlag, Berlin 1958.
• The Weimar National Assembly in 1919. Memories. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1962.
• with Arthur Pons: Conspiracy of the Defeated. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1963.

literature

• Sabine Roß : Political Participation and National Council Parliamentarism. Determinants of the political trade of the delegates to the Reichsrätekongressen 1918/1919. A collective biography (= Historical social research. Supplement No. 10, ISSN  0172-6404 ). Center for Historical Social Research, Cologne 1999, (at the same time: Berlin, Technical University, dissertation, 1997), online version .
• Ronny Kabus: "... I cry for my father every day". In the hands of Stalin and the SED. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-3102-0 , pp. 56-67.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Oehme in the catalog of the German National Library
• Walter Oehme in the files of the Reich Chancellery

Individual evidence

1. ^ Berthold Jacob : Plaidoyer for Schulz, Die Weltbühne from March 1927, Volume 31 / I, p. 446f.
2. ↑ Traugott Krischke was of the opinion that Ödön von Horváth used him as a model for the main character Schminke in the play " Sladek, the black Reichswehrmann ", cf. Karsten Brandt: The dissociation of a writer in the years 1934-1936: Ödön von Horváth and HW Becker . Diss. Berlin 2004, p. 24 ( PDF )