Fritz Schäffer

Fritz Schäffer on an election poster for the 1957 federal election

Friedrich "Fritz" Hermann Schäffer (born May 12, 1888 in Munich ; † March 29, 1967 in Berchtesgaden ) was a German politician ( BVP and CSU ).

In 1945 he was the first Bavarian Prime Minister after the Second World War. From 1949 to 1957 he was Federal Minister of Finance and from 1957 to 1961 Federal Minister of Justice .

education and profession

Schäffer was born on May 12, 1888 as the son of the later post office director Gottfried Schäffer and his wife Amalie, née. Mayr, born in Munich. He attended the Catholic elementary school in Ingolstadt and the humanistic high school in Neuburg an der Donau and Munich. After graduating from high school in Munich in 1907, Schäffer studied law and political science in Munich, which he completed in 1911 with the first state examination and in 1916 with the second state examination . In 1908 he became a member of the Apollo student union (today the Munich fraternity Franco-Bavaria ). In World War I he enlisted in 1914 as a volunteer and served as a soldier in the Royal Bavarian Infantry Life Guards and the Bavarian Royal 15th Infantry Regiment "King Frederick Augustus of Saxony" at the front. In 1917 he was discharged from military service because of a state of shock. He became an assessor in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior , in 1918 District Office Assessor in Kelheim and in 1920 Senior Councilor in the Ministry of Education and Culture . As a result of the takeover by the Nazis Schaffer was dismissed from the civil service and arrested on June 26 1933rd After his release in 1934, he was admitted to the bar. After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , he was arrested again as part of the Grid Action and taken to the Dachau concentration camp .

Political party

From 1918 until its dissolution in 1933, Schäffer was a member of the Bavarian People's Party (BVP). In 1918 he founded the BVP local association in Kelheim. From 1929 he was chairman of the BVP.

In 1945 Schäffer was one of the founders of the CSU and became its chairman in Munich. From 1946 to the beginning of 1948 the military government forbade him from any political activity. In January 1948 he became CSU district chairman of Upper Bavaria , but resigned from the CSU on September 14, 1948 because of a leadership dispute within the party. Previously, he had even negotiated with the Bavarian party about the transfer of the entire CSU district association of Upper Bavaria to BP. However, the negotiations failed because of the radical Bavarian wing of the BP around Ludwig Lallinger and Jakob Fischbacher . In 1949 Schäffer became a member of the CSU again, in which he represented the “Bavarian-etatist-Catholic” wing, while the “liberal-conservative-interdenominational” wing was headed by Josef Müller .

MP

From 1920 to 1933 Schäffer was a member of the Bavarian State Parliament for the constituency of Kelheim - Mainburg - Rottenburg .

From 1949 to 1961 he was a member of the German Bundestag . Here he was deputy chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group from September 1 to September 20, 1949 and also chairman of the CSU state group from September 7 to 20, 1949.

Fritz Schäffer always entered the Bundestag as a directly elected member of the Passau constituency . For reasons of age, he did not stand for election in the 1961 Bundestag elections .

Public offices

Fritz Schäffer (center) as Minister of Justice at a meeting with Alois Hundhammer and Eugen Gerstenmaier (1959)

From September 16, 1931 to March 16, 1933, Schäffer was the State Councilor in charge of managing the business of the Bavarian Ministry of Finance.

From May 28 to September 28, 1945 he was the first Bavarian Prime Minister appointed by the American military government after the Second World War . During this time he also headed the Bavarian Ministry of Finance . Shortly after the replacement of military governor George S. Patton , Schäffer was also deposed as Bavarian Prime Minister. The American military government justified this with the fact that Schäffer had not sufficiently cleared the public service of former NSDAP party members.

On September 20, 1949, Fritz Schäffer was appointed to the cabinet of Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as the first Federal Minister of Finance . He is the only finance minister who has saved up a credit that was jokingly called the Juliusturm . After the Bundestag election in 1957 , he moved to the Federal Ministry of Justice on October 29, 1957 . Since he wanted to leave politics with the 1961 federal election, he resigned from the federal government on November 14, 1961 .

criticism

During Schäffer's activity as finance minister, in the course of the German reparation policy, there were disputes with the SPD MP Adolf Arndt , which historians also referred to as the "Schäffer Affair". Arndt criticized the government's reparation policy in various Bundestag debates in 1954. Among other things, he accused Schäffer not only of personal delays in processing, but above all of the unjust distribution. Instead of looking after those persecuted by the Nazi state, members of the Condor Legion or the Nazi ideologist Otto Koellreutter were provided with the higher payments from “ tax money from a sheep-patient democracy ”.

Awards

• 1945: Honorary citizen of the community of Tuntenhausen
• 1953: Grand Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1958: Bavarian Order of Merit
• 1958: Honorary citizen of the city of Passau

literature

• Otto Altendorfer: Fritz Schäffer as a politician of the Bavarian People's Party 1888–1945 . Hanns Seidel Foundation, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-88795-750-4 (dissertation at the University of Passau 1990).
• Karl-Ulrich Gelberg:  Fritz Schäffer. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 8, Bautz, Herzberg 1994, ISBN 3-88309-053-0 , Sp. 1548-1559.
• Christoph Henzler: Fritz Schäffer 1945–1967: A biographical study of the first post-war Bavarian prime minister and first finance minister of the Federal Republic of Germany . Hanns Seidel Foundation, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88795-751-2 (dissertation at the University of Munich 1991).
• Franz Menges:  Schäffer, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , pp. 516-518 ( digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Fritz Schäffer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Fritz Schäffer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Fritz Schäffer in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Fritz Schäffer in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Files Edition . Weimar Republic
• Website of the Bavarian State Government: The Bavarian Prime Ministers since 1945 - Fritz Schäffer
• " Federal Finance Minister Fritz Schäffer: The closed hand policy " , Die Zeit from April 2, 1953.
• " Schäffer: Dilemma of his life " , Der Spiegel of March 26, 1952, p. 9.

supporting documents

1. ^ Fritz Schäffer, History of the CDU, Konrad Adenauer Foundation . In: Konrad Adenauer Foundation . ( kas.de [accessed November 1, 2017]).
2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , pp. 184-186.
3. ^ House of Bavarian History: Bavaria after World War II
4. ^ ^{A b} Kurt R. Grossmann: The debt of honor. Short story of reparation. Frankfurt a. M. 1967. p. 235 ff.
5. ↑ May 28, 1954; October 15, 1954; October 21, 1954.
6. ↑ In this context, Arndt also spoke of the “ ordeal of reparation and the lazy climate of our domestic politics ”.