Wilhelm Georg Schmidt

Wilhelm Georg Schmidt

Adolf Wilhelm Georg Schmidt (born March 5, 1900 in Wiesbaden ; † August 29, 1938 in Berlin ) was a master plumber , Reichshandwerkführer , president of the Wiesbaden Chamber of Crafts , member of the NSDAP , SS and SA . From 1933 he was a member of the Reichstag .

Life

After attending secondary school in Wiesbaden, Schmidt completed an apprenticeship as a plumber and passed the examination as a plumber and installation master in 1922. In 1925 he started his own business as a master plumber in Wiesbaden. His training time was interrupted by his participation in the First World War , in which he served in the 2nd Company of the Luftschiffer-Division II . In 1924 he volunteered with the 13th Infantry Regiment .

Schmidt was initially a member of a DVP youth group in 1921 before he joined the German National Guard and Protection Association. In January 1923 he joined the NSDAP for the first time. During the Allied occupation of the Rhineland , Schmidt was expelled from the occupied area from 1923 to 1925. After the NSDAP was temporarily banned, he rejoined the party ( membership number 33,560) in April 1926 and founded the NSDAP local group in Wiesbaden in the same year . He was a member of the SA from 1926 to 1928 and a member of the SS since 1931 (SS no. 20,548). In the SS he reached the rank of SS Oberführer on June 8, 1936 . In 1932 he was elected to the Prussian Landtag , to which he belonged until the corporation was dissolved in October 1933. In November 1933 he became a member of the National Socialist Reichstag .

Schmidt has been a leader in the DC circuit part of the German Chambers of Crafts. From 1933 to 1934 he was President of the Chamber of Crafts for the Wiesbaden district. How much he identified with the ideological ideas of the National Socialists is shown by a quote from his speech to the press on May 17, 1934: “... We are at a turning point at which the National Socialist state is writing new history with an iron hand. The reorganization of the handicraft organization in compulsory guilds and district handicrafts' associations completely does away with the liberalist-democratic handicraft organization [...] The principle of the law on the reorganization of the conditions in the handicrafts is the implementation of the leader principle. "In his speech at the Reichshandwerkstag in 1936 he stated:" The nucleus of a true national economy was and is and always will be craft. The way to the National Socialist economy goes through craft. "

On May 3, 1933, at a general assembly of the Reich Association of German Crafts, the establishment of a new association, the Reichsstandes des Deutschen Handwerks. Schmidt, along with other NSDAP members and Adrian von Renteln, was elected president of the Reichsstand executive board . Thus the craft had four organizations with board members in personal union , the Reichsverband des Deutschen Handwerks, the Reichsstand des Deutschen Handwerks, the German Chamber of Crafts and the professional associations in the Reichsstand des Deutschen Handwerks.

On January 26, 1934, Schmidt replaced Adrian von Renteln as Reich Craftsman and President of the Reichsstand. At a meeting of the presidents of the Chamber of Crafts on March 3 and 4, 1934 in Kassel, Schmidt compelled the presidents present to sign a signature that recognized the principle of the leadership and meant that the Reich craftsman could enforce the resignation of any President of the Crafts at any time, with the withdrawal of all legal claims. This paper was signed by almost everyone except for a few presidents who were considered insignificant. On March 29, 1934 Schmidt was able to report the execution to the Reich economic leader Hjalmar Schacht . Schmidt also signed an appeal in the journal of the Academy for German Law in 1934 : “Above the life of the nation and its ever-changing manifestations stands the law, which is born from the race and soul of the people, and means the nation's eternal bond to its own values. "

In November 1936 Schmidt had to resign as Reich master craftsman after disputes over competence with the head of the German Labor Front , Robert Ley . A party court case initiated against him in 1937 was closed in January 1938. A leave of absence from the SS service that existed parallel to the party court proceedings was justified by the fact that Schmidt had announced the remilitarization of the Rhineland early in a telephone call.

His grave is in the south-west cemetery Stahnsdorf . After Schmidt's death, Max Solbrig took over his seat in the Reichstag on September 10, 1938.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quotation from the exhibition catalog of the Deutsches Museum in Munich: Bavaria's way into modernity. Bayerns Handwerk from 1806 to 2006, Munich 2006. Available online: Bayerns Weg ...
2. ↑ Mark Seumer: cleaning industry for building cleaning trade. . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1998, pp 141 et seq Available online: Markus Seumer: cleaning industry ... .
3. ^ Schmidt, Wilhelm Georg. In: Ernst Klee: The personal dictionary for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007.
4. ^ Lilla, extras , p. 571.

literature

• Ernst Kienast (Ed.): Handbook for the Prussian Landtag , edition for the 5th electoral period, Berlin 1933, p. 380.
• Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 , p. 570 f .

Web links

• Wilhelm Georg Schmidt in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Schmidt, Wilhelm Georg. Hessian biography. (As of March 2, 2020). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
• Newspaper article about Wilhelm Georg Schmidt in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .