FUR-COAT OF CONTENTION: THE FALL OF GUSTAV BÖß
Today in Berlin: 7 November, 1929
The arrest of Max, Leo and Willi Sklarek on 26 September; 1929 - for several years the Sklarek brothers had been running a very successful textile business in Berlin - marked the beginning of his end.
Less than two months later, on November 7, 1929, Berlin’s popular and very capable governing mayor, Gustav Böß, chose to resign just ten days before communal election.
Not because he feared defeat or because he was no longer interested in pursuing political career. The well-respected local politician had a problem: his wife had been wearing a new coat. This would be one of those rare historic cases when a spouse’s attire would lead to somebody’s downfall.
Frau Böß’s elegant fur-coat would have her husband, the governing mayor of the third largest city on Earth (after London and New York), embroiled in one of biggest corruption scandals of the Weimar Republic, the Sklarek Affair.
Frau Böß received the said fur coat from the Sklarek brothers, a coat for which Mayor Böß eventually insisted on paying. Did he know that the amiable Sklareks had been crooks ripping the city of money through a series of clever shenanigans? Was he aware of their quiet syphoning off large credits from the city’s own bank? That they had been “supporting” many local politicians and public figures as well as small but useful fish in the local public bureaus? He might have had an inkling but none that would have brought the really big bells to toll. Yet Böß was not a silly man.
So when faced with the news of the gift the Sklarek brothers presented his wife with, he still had a chance to contain the damage. Sadly, his gut feeling failed: once he demanded to pay for the fur-coat (a respectable thing by all means), he was given the price. A price which so ridiculously low, that it should have made Böß think at least twice. But he pulled out his cheque-book and paid the dues instead.
This one seemingly insignificant gesture became the last nail in his political coffin. Attacked by both the Nazis and the Communists, abandoned by his own team, the Democrats (Gustav Böß was a member of the DDP, German Democratic Party), still busy explaining exactly how much he and his entourage paid for the trip to the US, he was doomed.
On November 8, 1929 Gustav Böß was to face a vote of no confidence in Berlin’s parliament. The vote, however, never take place. It was not cancelled to save him. Rather, the atmosphere is the Rotes Rathaus (Berlin’s main city hall and the seat of the city Senate) got so out of hand that the meeting had to be interrupted.
During the assembly, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) MP spoke very freely about his feelings towards Böß and the Demoracts - mincing no words and shouting through the hall. This inspired a 70-year-old MP for the Social-Democrats, Herr Temple, to smack him with gusto, thus leading to what almost became a free-for-all. Not a scene Berlin city hall had ever witnessed before.
Gustav Böß resigned.
It was no coincidence that the attacks on him grew more vicious at the time when they did. On November 17, 1929 Berlin was to hold an election in which another competing political formation was hoping to expand their influence in Berlin. As so often in the future and in the past, the NSDAP cleverly used the scandal for their own purposes.
On October 31, 1929 Böß returned to Berlin from the trip to the US - after the city of New York granted him the title of an honourary citizen. Despite his having been an excellent local politician and the man behind some of the most important reforms on the municipal level (new housing projects, new regulations, etc.) as well as a well-like character, it was to the sound of booing, shouting and whistling that he alighted from the train at Berlin’s Bahnhof “Zoologischer Garten”. He was threatened (“Jew-slave! Smother him!” screeched the Nazi mob) and offended in public.
A who stood behind all this?
The next day the vicious and ambitious leader of the NSDAP in Berlin, a spiteful little minion called Goebbels, wrote in his diary: “Last night, we, the National-Socialists, gave Böß a reception he had deserved. With taunting and whistling. That’s how it should be done.”
On 17 November, 1929 the NSDAP won their first seats in Berlin’s city parliament. At 5.8% they left the SPD (Social-Democrats) behind them and began their ascent to total power. Gustav Böß would be arrested in 1933 and imprisoned for nearly a year in Moabit. He would flee the city after his release, moving to Bavaria, where he died in February 1946.
Today he is considered to be one of the greatest municipal leaders and reformers of the twentieth-century Berlin.
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