Wilhelm Bitter

Wilhelm Bitter (born December 13, 1886 in Cologne , † June 9, 1964 in Ittenbach ) was a German publisher and politician ( Center Party , CDU ).

Life and work

Bitter was a publisher by trade. In October 1922 he became chairman of the board of the then Vestische Druckerei - und Verlags AG , based in Recklinghausen. He redeveloped the then defunct company, in which u. a. The Recklinghausen People's Newspaper , which is closely related to the German Center Party, was also relocated and built up a number of other local editions for the Recklinghausen district.

In March 1934, Bitter was the first publisher in Germany to be arrested by the Gestapo in Recklinghausen and taken into "protective custody". The then existing local newspaper had to be sold in 1935 to the NS newspaper National Zeitung in Essen. Bitter was arrested several times during the Nazi regime. After he was expelled from the Reich Press Chamber and the Reich Literature Chamber because of his anti-regime attitude, he succeeded in 1938 in Leipzig in founding a new publishing house at the German Book Trade Association, the "Paulus Verlag K.Bitter KG". As a subtitle he had to use the addition: “Publishing house for Catholic literature”. His wife Katharina Bitter acted as general partner, hence “K.Bitter KG”, since Bitter was considered too politically charged by the rulers themselves.

In the period up to approx. 1941 the publishing house published the literature of the Catholic youth center in Düsseldorf. The authors included a. the well-known hymn poet Georg Thurmair . After the war, this publishing house developed a lively publishing activity in the areas of Catholic theology, fiction, contemporary history and especially in the area of children's and young people's books. In the 50s u. a. Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster the publisher's picture. On the official order of the Vatican, Bitter published the “Red Book of the Persecuted Church”, for which he was honored by Pope Pius XII in a special audience.

In the 1960s u. a. the group 61 to the laid authors. I.a. Günter Wallraff and Max von der Grün (“Irrlicht und Feuer”) published their early works at what was then Paulus Verlag. In 1944 he was imprisoned twice. First because he had distributed Bishop Galen's pastoral letter as a special edition and then also in the course of the thunderstorm campaign . Bitter continued to work as a newspaper publisher after 1945 and in spring 1945 was one of the first publishers in the British zone to receive a license for a daily newspaper and a license for the diocese newspaper Church and Life in the Diocese of Münster. The then Bishop of Münster Clemens August Graf von Galen entrusted him with the relocation . As of 1952, Bitter published the Catholic weekly newspaper Echo Der Zeit at Paulus Verlag , which in the 1960s was at times the most cited German weekly newspaper, according to documents from the Federal Government's Press and Information Office.

politics

Bitter, who became a member of the Windhorst Bund in Cologne (youth organization of the Center Party) at the turn of the century, was for a time center secretary in Alsace-Lorraine. In 1912 he became secretary of the Center Party in Recklinghausen. During the Bolshevik uprising on the Ruhr in 1920 he had a prominent position in the suppression of the uprising and traveled to Berlin to the Reich government to inform the Reich government about the conditions on the Ruhr. From 1919 to 1923 he was a city councilor in Recklinghausen. After the Second World War he was a co-founder of the CDU in Recklinghausen and from 1946 to 1948 chairman of the CDU district association Recklinghausen. In addition, in 1947 he was the founder of the CDU Local Political Association in North Rhine-Westphalia and from 1948 to 1964 chairman of the CDU and CSU Local Political Association in Germany . In 1948/49, Bitter founded the "Kommunal Verlag", which is still the publisher of the "Kommunalpolitische Blätter". Bitter's son, Dr. Georg Bitter senior was the managing director of this company from 1950 to 1988, which also published local specialist literature in addition to the magazine.

Bitter was from 1919 to 1923 city councilor in Recklinghausen and from 1921 to 1925 a member of the Provincial Parliament of the Province of Westphalia . From 1946 to 1952 and from 1956 to 1961 he was a councilor for the city of Recklinghausen. He was a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament in 1946/1947.

Public offices and awards

Bitter was on an Allied list for the time after the war, since he was politically unencumbered and a staunch opponent of National Socialism. After the Allied invasion of Recklinghausen, he was appointed an honorary city councilor. Bitter served as Lord Mayor of the city of Recklinghausen from 1946 to 1948 . In addition, Bitter was from 1946 to 1951 and from 1956 to 1961 a city councilor in Recklinghausen, from 1946 to 1950 a member of the state parliament in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bitter was temporarily a member of the presidium of the city council of North Rhine-Westphalia and was a member of the Westphalia regional assembly. Bitter was honorary chairman of the KPV NRW, holder of the Federal Cross of Merit First Class and the Great Federal Cross of Merit , he was holder of the papal award " Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice " and "Knight of the Order of Holy New Year" , which Pope Johannes XXIII. awarded.

literature

G. Letter: Christian Democrats against Hitler , Herder Verlag
- here is a biography of Wilhelm Bitter
Horstwalter Heitzer: The CDU in the British zone , Düsseldorf 1988
50 years of peace , Recklinghausen 1995
Holger Arning: The Power of Salvation and the Disaster of Power , Paderborn 2008
Bernd Haunfelder (Ed.): North Rhine-Westphalia - Country and People. 1946-2006. A biographical manual. Aschendorff, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-402-06615-7 .
- with further references to Wilhelm Bitter
Georg Möllers, Wilhelm Bitter, in: Memorial book victims and places of rule, persecution and resistance in Recklinghausen 1933–1945 (www.recklinghausen.de/gedenkbuch)
Georg Möllers, elimination of the democratic press, in: Memorial book victims and places of rule, persecution and resistance in Recklinghausen 1933–1945 (www.recklinghausen.de/gedenkbuch)
Andreas Witt, The beginnings of the CDU in Recklinghausen and the importance of the city as a conference venue for the CDU in the British zone, in: Vestische Zeitschrift 99 (2002), pp. 403–484

Archivalia

Archive of the city of Recklinghausen, here files on Wilhelm Bitter
Main state archive of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, documents about the CDU parliamentary group
Archive of the Diocese of Münster, here archival material from Paulus Verlag, Echo der Zeit
Archive of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, here Wilhelm Bitter's estate

Individual evidence

^ Jörg-Dieter Gauger , Wilhelm Bitter, in: Günther Buch u. a. (Ed.), Christian Democrats against Hitler . From persecution and resistance to the Union (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), p. 96, ISBN 3-451-20805-9 .
^ Jörg-Dieter Gauger , Wilhelm Bitter, in: Günther Buch u. a. (Ed.), Christian Democrats against Hitler . From persecution and resistance to the Union (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), pp. 94–99, ISBN 3-451-20805-9 .

Web links

Wilhelm Bitter at the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia

personal data
SURNAME	Bitter, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German publisher and politician (center, CDU), MdL
DATE OF BIRTH	December 13, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cologne
DATE OF DEATH	June 9, 1964
Place of death	Ittenbach

[1] Jörg-Dieter Gauger , Wilhelm Bitter, in: Günther Buch u. a. (Ed.), Christian Democrats against Hitler . From persecution and resistance to the Union (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), p. 96, ISBN 3-451-20805-9 .

[2] Jörg-Dieter Gauger , Wilhelm Bitter, in: Günther Buch u. a. (Ed.), Christian Democrats against Hitler . From persecution and resistance to the Union (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), pp. 94–99, ISBN 3-451-20805-9 .