Wilhelm Spiegel

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Painting City Councilor Wilhelm Spiegel (1953) by painter Niels Brodersen

Wilhelm mirror (* 22. June 1876 in Gelsenkirchen , † 12. March 1933 in Kiel ) was a German SPD - politician , lawyer and notary . His murder by the National Socialists marked the takeover of power by the NSDAP in Kiel.

Life

After graduating from the Schalke grammar school in 1895, Spiegel studied law in Munich, Berlin, Bonn and Kiel. In 1905 he settled in Kiel as a lawyer with a doctorate . Six months later he married Emma Loeb in The Hague, the Netherlands . His brother Otto, four years younger than him , who also settled in Kiel in 1907, was the first specialist pediatric doctor in Schleswig-Holstein .

From 1911 to 1933 Spiegel was a member of the Kiel city ​​council , from 1919 to 1924 he chaired it. He was also deputy chairman of the Israelite community in Kiel and a member of the board of the local adult education center . He was particularly connected to Ferdinand Tönnies , Ernst Kantorowicz (social worker) and Walther Schücking .

During the Kapp Putsch of 1920 he was one of the leading representatives of the Kiel workforce , who not only helped put down the putsch, but also, as the workers' negotiator, tried to end the dispute without bloodshed. So he negotiated with the Loewenfeld Freikorps alone and without protection in a barricaded barracks and gave him free retreat.

assassination

In 1932 the proceedings against the editor-in-chief of the social democratic Schleswig-Holstein Volkszeitung , Kurt Wurbs, whom Spiegel represented as a lawyer, gained national notoriety . The People's Daily had claimed that the Nazis were preparing a civil war. The plaintiff in these proceedings was Adolf Hitler . Spiegel summoned Hitler as a witness. Instead, the SA chief Ernst Röhm appeared as a witness and emphasized the love of the National Socialists for justice and law, which the judges believed. Because they condemned the Schleswig-Holstein newspaper. In February 1933, shortly after the National Socialist “ seizure of power ”, an SS leader publicly called for the murder of Spiegel, who the Nazis hated as a well-known Social Democrat and Jew.

On March 11, 1933, one day before the local elections, the National Socialists occupied the town hall, replaced Mayor Emil Lueken , dissolved the city council and declared the NSDAP district leader Walter Behrens as the new mayor. The following night, two National Socialists, one of them in SA or SS uniform, asked for admission to the house in Spiegels at Forstweg 42 in Kiel. While two other men were standing guard on the street, they shot the man in front of them into his study in the back of the head.

In a letter from Ferdinand Tönnies to Max Graf zu Solms of March 14, 1933, it says about the murder:

“On the night from Saturday to Sunday, the amiable and clever lawyer Spiegel I know well is here, who enjoyed general respect, at night from 2 people who introduced themselves as 'police officers' made themselves annoying by loud ringing after he himself opened the door and forced them in to find out what they wanted, shot dead on the fly !!! Such an iniquity as I have hardly seen it. But Spiegel was a Jew from the Rhineland. He leaves his widow and 3 half-grown children, 2 of them sons, who make a very nice impression. "

At Spiegel's funeral in the old urn cemetery on March 15, thousands of Kiel workers formed a line. The funeral procession through the streets of the city turned into a final demonstration of the republican Kiel. The workforce in shipyards and factories had stopped working despite Nazi threats. The funeral speech for Spiegel was held by his friend and political companion Otto Eggerstedt . Behrens used the investigation as a pretext to deliver leading Kiel SPD members to the Oranienburg concentration camp and to smash the Kiel SPD within two days. The investigations, which were never seriously directed against the Nazis, ended in the summer of 1933.

After 1945, a former SS man was suspected of complicity and arrested. He committed suicide while in custody.

Commemoration

Stumbling stone in front of Wilhelm Spiegel's former home

From December 1947 to February 1948 part of the forest path was called Wilhelm-Spiegel-Weg . In 1993, a street in Wellsee was christened Wilhelm-Spiegel-Straße by the Kiel council assembly.

A portrait of Spiegel, created by Niels Brodersen , has been in the corridor in front of the council chamber since 1953 . On the 60th anniversary of Spiegel's death in 1993, a memorial plaque was added. Another memorial plaque is in the Kiel district court . The building of the state central bank opposite the town hall was named "Wilhelm-Spiegel-Haus". In 1995 a bronze plaque to commemorate Spiegel was placed at the entrance of the house. On October 11, 2006, a stumbling block was laid in front of the former house in Spiegel . Wilhelm Spiegel's grave is cared for by the city of Kiel as a grave of honor .

In the novel Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson reference is made to the murder.

literature

  • Wilhelm Spiegel. In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Volume 1: Deceased Personalities. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. GmbH, Hanover 1960, p. 296.
  • Volker Jakob: Wilhelm Spiegel: Jew - Lawyer - Socialist. The first murder victim of anti-Semitic violence. In: Gerhard Paul, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (ed.): Menora and swastika. On the history of the Jews in and from Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck and Altona (1918–1998). Neumünster 1998, pp. 205-213.
  • Volker Jakob: Wilhelm Spiegel 1876–1933. In: Communications from the Society for Kiel City History. Volume 77, pp. 109-114.

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Spiegel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heinz-Jürgen Schneider u. a .: The lawyers of the Red Aid of Germany: Political defense lawyers in the Weimar Republic - history and biographies. Bonn 2002, p. 274.
  2. ↑ Eduard Seidler : Jewish pediatricians 1933–1945. Basel / New York 2007, p. 308 f.
  3. ↑ a b Press release of the City of Kiel of March 7, 2008: Commemoration of the murder of Wilhelm Spiegel
  4. ^ A b c d e f Städtische Friedhöfe Kiel: Graves of honor in Kiel. Wilhelm Spiegel.
  5. ↑ a b c d Working Group for Research into National Socialism in Schleswig-Holstein eV: Information on the stumbling block from Dr. Wilhelm Spiegel (PDF; 222 kB).
  6. ↑ Christian Tilitzki : The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, Part 1 , Berlin 2002, p. 176 fn. 496
  7. ↑ a b c Speech by Jürgen Weber on the occasion of the memorial event for the Nazi takeover of power 75 years ago in Kiel ( ulrike-rodust.eu ).
  8. ↑ https://spd-geschichtswerkstatt.de/wiki/Schleswig-Holsteinische_Volkszeitung#Hitler-Prozess
  9. ↑ a b The virtual museum: The murder of the lawyer Wilhelm Spiegel
  10. ↑ Kiel Memorial Day: March 11, 1933. The National Socialists bring Kiel Town Hall under their rule . City archive page on the City of Kiel website, viewed on September 8, 2019.
  11. ↑ Quoted from Uwe Carstens: Ferdinand Tönnies, Friese und Weltbürger , p. 290.
  12. ↑ a b Hans-G. Hilscher, Dietrich Bleihöfer: Wilhelm-Spiegel-Strasse. In: Kiel Street Lexicon. Continued since 2005 by the Office for Building Regulations, Surveying and Geoinformation of the State Capital Kiel, as of February 2017 ( kiel.de ).
    Hans-G. Hilscher, Dietrich Bleihöfer: Wilhelm-Spiegel-Weg. In: Kiel Street Lexicon. Continued since 2005 by the Office for Building Regulations, Surveying and Geoinformation of the State Capital Kiel, as of February 2017 ( kiel.de ).
  13. ↑ Holger Helbig (Ed.): Johnson's 'Anniversaries'. The comment. Göttingen 1999, p. 220.
  14. ^ Norbert Mecklenburg: The narrative art of Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries and other prose. Frankfurt / Main 1997, p. 400.
personal data
SURNAME Spiegel, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and politician (SPD)
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelsenkirchen
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1933
Place of death Kiel