Willi Müller (politician, 1896)

Willi Müller (1960)

Willi Müller (born March 29, 1896 in Braunschweig , † May 17, 1964 in Bad Sachsa ) was a German politician ( SPD ).

Life

Willi Müller grew up in Bad Sachsa and completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter after attending school . In 1914 he enlisted in the First World War as a volunteer and was wounded. He came to Switzerland as a prisoner of war with the French troops.

He has been involved in the social democracy in Bad Sachsa since 1923, from 1926 he was a city councilor of the SPD and worked from 1926 to 1933 as a postman at the local post office. In 1933 he was dismissed from the postal service as a social democrat due to the law to restore the civil service of April 7, 1933. The Nazi regime prevented Müller from asserting his pension claims, so that he had to foreclose his house in 1934 and get by with odd jobs. After temporarily working as a carpenter and retraining to become an accountant, he worked at the Kneiff chewing tobacco factory in Nordhausen . During the Second World War he was a department head at the Bad Sachsa office of Dynamit AG (DAG), which later became Dynamit Nobel AG . After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Müller was temporarily interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp and released after six weeks because he was considered indispensable by Dynamit Nobel.

On May 4, 1945, Müller, who was considered politically sound due to his fate between 1933 and 1945, was appointed mayor of Bad Sachsa by the US occupation forces. One of the first official acts as mayor was the liberation of the Stauffenberg children in the Borntal in Bad Sachsa.

Alfred von Hofacker describes it like this:

“On May 4th we received a visit from the new mayor of Bad Sachsa. He called us all to him and gave a solemn address in which he made it clear to us that we would be under his protection from now on and that he wanted to work for us to return home soon. And then he said literally, I quote from my sister's diary: And now your name is again as it used to be, you don't need to be ashamed of your names and fathers, because they were heroes. "

By order of the British military government , the previous mayor Willi Müller took over the office of city ​​director on April 1, 1946 ; it was confirmed on October 10, 1947 by the city council of Bad Sachsa. The main focus of his activity was supplying the population with food and rebuilding the spa in the spa.

Müller worked in a variety of voluntary capacities. He was chairman of the local association of the SPD, the winter sports association WSV, the Harzklub branch association, and the tourist association and represented the interests of the Harz as a board member of the German swimming pool association. He was also a member of the district council .

After his retirement for health reasons in 1960, he took over the chairmanship of the district housing association Osterode am Harz .

Awards

• In 1964 Müller was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit.
• Willi Müller was elected as honorary chairman of the board of the Harzer Verkehrsverband (HVV, today HTV)

literature

• Alfred von Hofacker: Caesar von Hofacker. A pioneer for and a resistance fighter against Hitler, a contradiction? , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2010 ISBN 978-3-8353-0626-4

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Markus Jaeger: The city of Bad Sachsa under National Socialism (1924-1935). (No longer available online.) In: www.spurensucheharz.de. Working group search for traces in the southern Harz region, archived from the original on December 6, 2015 ; Retrieved April 29, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Willi Müller In: Harzkurier of October 30, 1971