The Oberlandrats represented the middle link of the occupation administration of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Twenty-three of them were established in Bohemia, including the Oberlandrat in Kolín nad Labem. On 1 October 1940, the districts of Ledeč nad Sázavou and Světlá nad Sázavou, Dolní Kralovice, Německý (Havlíčkův) Brod and Humpolec were added to the Kolín Oberlandrat. Zruč nad Sázavou and the Bata concern plant, built in the local part of Bat'ov, were thus also under the jurisdiction of the Cologne occupation administration and its officials. Before the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, the imperial official from Dresden, Dr. Herbert Eugen Eckholdt (* 1906), was appointed head of the Cologne Oberlandrat, to whom all the lower offices, service posts and authorities of the Cologne Oberlandrat, with the exception of the judiciary and the military, were subject. Eckholdt was an ambitious imperial official whose aim was to strengthen the population, economic and cultural influence of the Germans in his district. He demonstrated this, for example, by the pompous celebration of the so-called German Day in Cologne (6-8 June 1941), when he handed over the Cologne NSDAP House to the NSDAP leader and Reich Governor in the Sudetenland, Konrad Henlein. The ambitious Reich-German official also intended to concentrate the regional industrial potential in Kolín, and therefore in the autumn of 1940 he turned his attention to Zruč nad Sázavou, where the Bata concern plant was growing up. The dispute with the concern's management in Zlín over the transfer of the Zruč plant to the local Zálabí district of Kolín culminated on 19 February 1941, when the Oberlandrat banned all construction activity in Zruč. A month later (13 March 1941), a meeting was held in Zruč nad Sázavou between representatives of the local government (the mayor of Zruč and the district governor of Ledec), the Bata concern, a. s., Zlín (directors Alfred Miesbach and Hugo Vavrečka and architects Vladimír Karfík and Jiří Voženílek) and the German occupation administration headed by Dr. Eckholdt. The dispute over the existence and non-existence of the Bata concern factory in Zrč was eventually resolved in favour of the Bata concern, which, however, had to agree to concessions in the field of architecture in favour of traditionalist German architecture (Heimatstil). A year later, further changes to the administrative structure of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia put an end to the ambitious plans of the Cologne Oberlandrat Eckholdt. With Reinhard Heydrich's administrative reform, the Kolín Oberlandrat was abolished in May 1942 and first territorially attached to the Oberlandrat with its seat in Prague (1942-1944), then with the political districts of Čáslav, Český Brod, Kolín and Kutná Hora attached to the Oberlandrat in Hradec Králové (1944-1945). Dr. Herbert Eugen Eckholdt left Kolín for Plzeň and no longer had any influence on the Bata factory in Zruč.