It would be a ridiculous ending to this story. Long after his death, a celebrated artist turns out to be a high-ranking official in the criminal Nazi war machine. Shortly before his hometown turns away from him, one of the man’s distant relatives appears. In a letter she claims that everything was completely different. The artist, who was demonstrably the right-hand man of a major Nazi war criminal, was in fact an opponent of the Hitler regime. Someone who could be “assigned to the resistance” and is even said to have known about the Stauffenberg assassination attempt on the dictator. A hero then?
Since the spring, there has been a struggle in Neuburg an der Donau in Upper Bavaria over how to deal with the composer and Nazi general Paul Winter. It’s a debate that sometimes hurts – the attempt to portray Winter as a resister is just the latest example. The Berlin German Resistance Memorial Center, which documents the failed Stauffenberg assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, is aware of “no evidence” of Winter’s connection to the resistance around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, as director Johannes Tuchel says.
Last year, the historian Manfred Veit shared his research with the town hall, according to which the local hero Winter, born in Neuburg in 1894, was deeply involved in the Nazi system. As head of the Central Office in the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), which reported directly to Adolf Hitler, he served as a loyalist to OKW chief Wilhelm Keitel. For him, Winter was an “irreplaceable” bureaucrat, whom he praised in reviews: “unwavering National Socialist”. In 1946 Keitel was executed for war crimes. Criminal orders also passed through Winter’s department, said Veit.
The tips went unanswered for months. Only after the historian had given his essay to the press did a tough debate begin. Neuburg’s mayor Bernhard Gmehling (CSU) appeared as a doubter. Winter was “not a hero,” said Gmehling. But the research presented by the former district administrator Veit was not enough for him to “break the baton over Paul Winter”. In the district council he was the only one to vote against renaming the Neuburg Paul-Winter-Realschule. He also rejected changing the name of Paul-Winter-Straße.
That eight years earlier, the then head of the Neuburg City Archives, Barbara Zeitelhack, described that Winter was also “in the service of Nazi propaganda” as the composer of the 1936 Olympic fanfare and the 1938 “Greater Germany” anthem? Didn’t play a role in the debate.
Last week, the Neuburg city council decided how to deal with Winter – and chose a middle path: the street name remains, but information about Winter’s Nazi role is added. The committee has distanced itself from his appointment as an honorary citizen and his honorary grave will no longer be cared for. And the thing about resistance? “I can only shake my head,” says historian Veit.