Werner Hassenpflug (lawyer)

Werner Hassenpflug (born August 23, 1901 , † September 12, 1976 in Detmold ) was a German ministerial official and railway worker.

Life

Hassenpflug studied law and, after completing the second state examination in 1930, joined the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft as an assessor . Initially employed in the Reichsbahndirektion Wuppertal , in 1932 he took over the management of the personnel department of the Reichsbahndirektion Altona as Reichsbahnrat (from 1937 Reichsbahndirektion Hamburg).

After the " seizure of power " by the NSDAP , of which Hassenpflug had been a member since November 1, 1931 (membership number 707 426), his tasks from April 1933 included, above all, the implementation of the Law on Civil Servants in the area of ​​the Altona Reich Railway Directorate. The Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft was not part of the direct state administration until 1937. Its general director Julius Dorpmüller took over - as already intended in the professional civil servants law - the corresponding regulations for the Reichsbahn, not least to secure his position, which was still uncertain after the change of power. By 1935, most of the Jewish civil servants and workers in the Reich Railway Directorate had been dismissed, including those who were initially protected from dismissal by the combatant privilege .

The active National Socialist Hassenpflug, who was also a member of the SA , was given the special function of a "political advisor" in July 1938 after the annexation of Austria at the "Abwicklungsstelle Österreich" set up by the Reich Ministry of Transport in Vienna . The task of the processing center was to transfer the Austrian Federal Railways to the Reichsbahn. Hassenpflug was responsible for the entire personnel area. After the removal of Jewish railway workers from the railway service in the first few weeks after the Anschluss, primarily through arbitrary dismissals, Hassenpflug took on the task of continuing this in a legally “correct” manner. He endeavored to implement the measures taken in the “Altreich” since 1933 for the “ Aryanization ” of the Reichsbahn in a shorter time and as effectively as possible. When Jewish railway workers were declared “unworthy” of being sworn in on Adolf Hitler, which is necessary for Reich German officials , their removal from service was legally implemented. Hassenpflug was able to complete his task with the dissolution of the processing office on March 31, 1939 to the satisfaction of the Reichsbahn management.

From December 1, 1938, Hassenpflug, who had meanwhile been promoted to the Oberreichsbahnrat, was active in the Reichsbahn management of the Reichsautobahnen . In 1940 he moved to the Reich Ministry of Transport (RVM) in Berlin, where he was directly subordinate to State Secretary Wilhelm Kleinmann as a ministerial advisor and consultant for personnel matters for senior civil servants . On January 1, 1942, Hassenpflug took over the EV personnel affairs department in the RVM as the successor to Hermann Osthoff . Here he mainly took care of the expansion of the employment of women and “ foreign workers ”. At that time he was the youngest ministerial director in the RVM and, in his role as head of the railway personnel department, he was also a member of the board of the Reichsbahn. The personnel department of the RVM was shaped in a special way by active and young National Socialists like Hassenpflug, apart from him as department head, seven of the eleven speakers in his department belonged to his generation, all speakers were also members of the NSDAP. On July 1, 1944, he moved to the RVM as head of the inland navigation department . On August 12, 1944, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross without Swords.

After the war, Hassenpflug, like almost all leading employees in the personnel department, was no longer an option for the rebuilding of the Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB) due to the close connection with National Socialism for managerial tasks in his previous department. In contrast to, for example, its financial administration or the operating and construction departments, DB almost always relied on unencumbered workers in the personnel department of its head office, some of whom, such as Johann Hatje , came from the ranks of railway unionists and social democrats who were persecuted and dismissed from 1933 onwards. Only one of the pre-war consultants was transferred to the personnel department. Until he retired, Hassenpflug stayed with the DB subsidiary Bayern Express , which operated long-distance bus routes between West Berlin and the Federal Republic during the division of Germany.

literature

• Alfred Gottwaldt : The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939. Anti-Semitism on the railways in the pre-war period . Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-86539-254-1 , short biography on p. 436

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Historical on-site visit in Eimsbüttel: Werner Hassenpflug, chief executive of the Hamburg Reichsbahndirektion , accessed on January 25, 2015
2. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939. Anti-Semitism on the railways in the pre-war period. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, p. 122 ff.
3. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939. Anti-Semitism on the railways in the pre-war period. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, p. 273
4. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939. Anti-Semitism on the railways in the pre-war period. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, p. 266
5. ↑ ^{a b} Christopher Kopper : The railway in the economic miracle: Deutsche Bundesbahn and transport policy in post-war society . Contributions to the historical traffic research of the Deutsches Museum, Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3593383286 , p. 48