Otto Telschow

Telschow was born in Wittenberge, the son of a judicial officer. Until 1893 he was a student at the Royal Prussian boys’ military education institute in Annaburg. Trained as a cavalryman, he served until 1897 with the 11th (2nd Brandenburg) Uhlan Regiment in Saarburg and from 1898 to 1902 with the 15th (Hannover) Hussars Regiment ("Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands") in Wandsbek, attaining the rank of sergeant.[1]

In 1902 he resigned from the military and became an administrative police official in Hamburg. Telschow joined the anti-Semitic German Social Party in 1905. He served with the police until the beginning of the First World War. He was drafted as a field hospital inspector and served from 1914 to 1917 on the front lines in Flanders, Romania and the Baltic States, earning the Iron Cross, 2nd class. From the end of 1917 to the end of 1918 he worked as a hospital chief inspector in Reserve Hospital III in Bremen.[2]

After the war, he resumed his police career, working from 1919 to 1924 as an administrative officer in the Hamburg police department. He was dismissed from the police in March 1924 because of his activities as district leader of the radically völkisch and anti-Semitic German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) in the Harburg district. From 1924 to July 1925 he was the leader of the DVFP in Lüneburg and Stade, the two eastern Regierungsbezirke (government districts) of the Prussian Province of Hanover. He was also a member of the German Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, the largest and most active anti-Semitic federation in Germany.[3]

When the ban that had been imposed on the Nazi Party in the wake of the failed Beer Hall Putsch was lifted and the Party was re-founded on 27 February 1925, Telschow was charged with organizing the Party in Lüneburg and Stade. In June 1925 he founded an Ortsgruppe (Local District) in Buchholz, the first Nazi local organization in northern Lower Saxony. Telschow formally joined the Nazi Party in July (membership number 7,057) and on 15 July Adolf Hitler formally named him Gauleiter of Gau Lüneburg-Stade.[4]

On 10 September 1925, Telschow joined the National Socialist Working Association, headed by Gregor Strasser. This was an association of northern and northwestern Gauleiters who supported the "revolutionary" left wing of the Party (as opposed to the more moderate wing that advocated participation in electoral campaigns) until it was dissolved in 1926 following the Bamberg Conference.[5]

On 20 May 1928, Telschow was defeated in his first bid to be elected to the Reichstag and to the Prussian Landtag. On 1 October 1928, Telschow's Gau was renamed Gau Eastern Hanover and he was retained as Gauleiter, serving until the end of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Also in October 1928, Telschow founded the weekly Nazi newspaper Niedersachsen-Stürmer (The Lower Saxon Stormer) which he published until May 1945. He also often gave speeches against Jews, Freemasons and Communists. In November 1929 he was elected to the Hanover Provincial Landtag. In September 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag for electoral constituency 15, Eastern Hanover, and remained a member until May 1945.[6]

After the Nazi seizure of power, Telschow was named president of the provincial Landtag in April 1933. On 10 April he was appointed a member of the Prussian State Council. He was retained as a member when it was reconstituted by Prussian Ministerpräsident Hermann Göring as an advisory body and convened on 15 September 1933. In 1934 he was made a Prussian Provincial Councilor for the Province of Hanover, and in September 1935 he was named to the Academy for German Law. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Telschow served as a member of the Defense Committee for Wehrkreis (Military District) XI from 22 September 1939. On 15 November 1940, he was made the Gau Housing Commissioner for his jurisdiction, and on 16 May 1941 he was charged with all municipal construction for the city of Lüneburg.[7]

Unlike most other Gauleiters, Telschow was not a member of either the SA or the SS. One of the older Gauleiters, and not particularly ambitious or capable, Telschow often turned over the day-to-day running of his Gau to his Deputy, Heinrich Peper.[8] In the postwar memoir by Albert Krebs, the former Gauleiter of Hamburg, Telschow was characterized in this way:

On his frequent visits to our headquarters, we usually tried to compliment him out the door as quickly as possible because he kept us from working and also had nothing particularly clever to contribute to a conversation ... a man of undoubtedly honest intentions but not equipped with any noteworthy abilities … he knew nothing about the interconnections, background, and effective forces of politics or history.[9]

In addition, complaints began to surface concerning multiple allegations of womanizing by Telschow. An investigation by Walter Buch’s Oberste Parteigericht (Supreme Party Court) recommended the opening of formal proceedings against him. However, in December 1941, this was quashed due to the intervention of Martin Bormann who was familiar with Hitler's reluctance to discipline or remove any Alter Kämpfer (old fighter) that had been with him from the earliest days.[10]

When on 16 November 1942 the jurisdiction of the Reich Defense Commissioners was changed from the Wehrkreis to the Gau level, Telschow was appointed to this position for his Gau. In this capacity, he had jurisdiction over civil defense and evacuation measures, as well as control over the war economy, including rationing and suppression of black market activities.[11]

Toward the close of the war, when British troops entered Lüneburg on 18 April 1945, Telschow fled from his villa to a hunting lodge near Dahlenburg. There he was arrested by British soldiers. He attempted suicide by slashing his wrists and ingesting poison while being transported back to Lüneburg, where he died on 31 May 1945.[12]

• Höffkes, Karl (1986). Hitlers Politische Generale. Die Gauleiter des Dritten Reiches: ein biographisches Nachschlagewerk. Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag. ISBN 3-87847-163-7.
• Klee, Ernst (2005). Das Personen-Lexikon zum Dritten Reich. Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8.
• Krebs, Albert (1976). The Infancy of Nazism: The Memoirs of Ex-Gauleiter Albert Krebs, 1923-1933. New Viewpoints. ISBN 978-0-531-05376-8.
• Miller, Michael D.; Schulz, Andreas (2021). Gauleiter: The Regional Leaders of the Nazi Party and Their Deputies, 1925 - 1945. Vol. 3 (Fritz Sauckel - Hans Zimmermann). Fonthill Media. ISBN 978-1-781-55826-3.
• Orlow, Dietrich (1969). The History of the Nazi Party: 1919-1933. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0-8229-3183-4.

• Newspaper clippings about Otto Telschow in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Information about Otto Telschow in the Reichstag database
• Nils Köhler. "Otto Telschow – Hitlers Gauleiter in Osthannover" (PDF) (in German). Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 April 2016.
• "Otto Telschow: Polizeibeamter und Politiker". Prignitzlexikon (in German). Archived from the original on 29 June 2009.