Walter Zwingenberger

Georg Walter Zwingenberger (born August 30, 1880 in Hohenstein-Ernstthal , † March 25, 1963 in Kiel ) was a German local politician. He was Lord Mayor of Zittau from 1923 to 1944 .

Live and act

After attending grammar school in Chemnitz , Zwingenberger studied law and economics at the Universities of Marburg and Leipzig . He did his legal clerkship in Chemnitz, Reichenau and Auerbach / Vogtl. from. He then became a council assessor in Hohenstein-Ernstthal. From 1909 to 1915 he was mayor of Brand-Erbisdorf and from 1915 to 1919 mayor of Oederan . This was followed by a position as mayor in Zittau, before he succeeded Wilhelm Külz as mayor of this city in 1923 . During his tenure, a number of building projects were carried out, including the new building of the city ​​theater . After the seizure of power by the NSDAP the continued non-party Zwingenberger remained while in office, he was but in 1937 deprived the competence for personnel matters. Because of his refusal to consent to the expropriation of the municipal power station, he was dismissed as mayor on October 31, 1944 by the Saxon governor Martin Mutschmann .

After the end of the war, he was reinstated in his old office for a short time by the Soviet occupation forces in May 1945 , but soon afterwards he was appointed provisional district administrator for the Zittau district. He lost this office on June 30, 1945, after which he opened a law firm in Großschönau . In December 1947, Zwingenberger was arrested because after 1933 he was now considered a "main criminal" within the meaning of the Control Council Directive No. 38 because of his work as Lord Mayor . In a show trial in September 1948 in the Zittauer Volkshaus, he was sentenced to three years in prison. After an unsuccessful petition for revision and a petition for clemency, he had to serve this until 1950 in the Brandenburg penal institution.

After his release from prison, Zwingenberger first returned to his family in Zittau and moved to his daughter in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957, where he lived in an old people's home in Leonberg and later in Kiel until his death.

literature

• Degeners who is it? Xth edition, Berlin 1935, p. 1796.
• Dieter Hofmann: Walther Zwingenberger - Lord Mayor of Zittau from 1923 to 1944 . In: Oberlausitzer Heimatblätter Heft 26 (2010), pp. 24–39.
• Reichs Handbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft, the handbook of personalities in words and pictures . Editor Robert Volz , foreword by Ferdinand Tönnies. Volume 2 (L – Z), Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1931, DNB 453960294 , p. 2103.