Siegfried Witte

Siegfried Witte (born February 9, 1897 in Rostock ; † November 19, 1961 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a Mecklenburg politician , Minister of Economics for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Mecklenburg from 1946 to 1950, member of the state parliament, district chairman, co-founder of the CDU in Rostock.

Siegfried Witte had a lasting influence on the basic understanding of economic policy of the CDU in the Soviet Zone . Coming from a liberal entrepreneurial family himself, he advocated the coexistence of private and state-owned company structures. At the 2nd People's Congress in Berlin on March 18, 1948, Witte pleaded for a democratic economic system: "Fierce competition between private and state-owned companies under the same conditions seems to me to be the highest level of economic productivity, especially for our German conditions ..." Witte also contributed that the CDU in the Soviet Zone opposed the SED's two-year plan with its own economic concept. This inevitably came into opposition to the SED, which tried to enforce its claim to leadership. In January 1950, he was ousted from office with a defamatory campaign.

Life

Witte came from a liberal family. His grandfather Friedrich Witte founded a small pharmaceutical factory in Rostock and was a liberal member of the Reichstag . His father Friedrich Carl Witte was a co-founder of the DDP , its Mecklenburg state chairman and member of the Mecklenburg-Schwerin constitutional state parliament in 1919. Siegfried Witte attended elementary school and from Easter 1909 the large city school in Rostock . Barely 17 years old, he registered as a volunteer and took part in the First World War.

After the war he studied business administration, economics and economic geography at the Berlin School of Management. In 1920 he passed the examination to become a business graduate. In July 1921 he received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt am Main. rer. pole. PhD. Witte joined his father's company, became a partner in 1925 and continued to run it together with his brother Carl August Witte after his father's death in 1938. In 1926 Witte became a member of the DDP, but was hardly involved because of business obligations. Business trips took him to Latin America. The democrat Witte kept his distance from the Nazi regime. As chairman of the trusteeship of the Inner Mission Mecklenburg Witte worked in the church area, for example he checked the books of the deaconess house and children's home Lobetal in Lübenheen .

After the Second World War , Witte became politically active. Together with like-minded people, he founded a local CDU association in Rostock at the end of July 1945. He soon acted as district chairman, city representative and, after the state elections in the Soviet Zone in 1946, as a member of the state parliament. Witte became deputy chairman of the CDU parliamentary group and was nominated by them in November 1946 as Minister of Economics. With Siegfried Witte , the CDU now placed three ministers in Wilhelm Höcker's cabinet (first prime minister after the war, SED). Since Witte rejected the expropriation of industrial companies on the pretext of denazification , he came into conflict with Interior Minister Johannes Warnke (SED). The old communist Warnke was actually the strong man in the state government. The main human resources and training department was under his department. This enabled him to infiltrate the bureaucratic apparatus with communist functionaries and manipulate them at will. At the end of 1949 the SED, which on the Soviet model already saw itself as a Stalinist party of a new type, began to fight against reactionary elements in the bourgeois parties. Siegfried Witte was attacked in particular in the state newspaper - the SED organ. The smear campaign called his loyalty to the Soviet Union and the workers in question and culminated in the accusation that he had been consul for fascist Spain (in fact, he had been Spanish vice-consul since 1931 - so already in republican times). The SED parliamentary group in the state parliament withdrew his confidence in him, and appointed demonstrators protested against Witte in front of the gates. On January 30, 1950 Siegfried Witte announced his resignation. The executive state board of the CDU Mecklenburg - now consisting only of members of the SED - removed Witte from all party offices on February 23, 1950 for behavior that was harmful to the party and excluded him from the CDU. Witte was briefly in custody, was released and fled to the West. The process before the Greifswald Regional Court was discontinued in August 1951. In the same month his brother was replaced as managing director of the Rostock company by a trustee. In October 1952, the pharmaceutical factory was already publicly owned as VEB Pepton.

Siegfried Witte settled down with his brother in Frankfurt am Main and continued to run the company there on a small scale. From 1952, Dr. Witte also runs the business of the Königsteiner Kreis , an association of lawyers, economists and civil servants from the Soviet occupation zone. The association provided information about the situation in the Soviet Zone / GDR, organized lectures and arranged for expert reports. Witte was also a member of the CDU in exile . He died on November 19, 1961 in Frankfurt am Main.

Fonts

• Restriction and maintenance of entrepreneurship in modern industrial development. Dissertation Frankfurt am Main 1921.
• The situation of the German large and medium-sized cities , in: Contributions to economic geography: Ernst Tiessen on the 60th birthday. Berlin 1931, pp. 171–176.
• The Königsteiner Kreis 1949-1959. 10 years of cooperation in the reunification of Germany in peace and freedom. Frankfurt am Main 1959.

literature

• Bodo Keipke: Siegfried Witte , in: Pettke, Sabine (ed.): Biographisches Lexikon für Mecklenburg , vol. 3, Rostock 2001, p. 321 ff.
• Damian van Melis, / Bartusel, Rolf: Functional elites in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 1945 to 1952. A biographical lexicon. Online edition .
• Christian Schwießelmann: North German, Protestant, Liberal - Founding Personalities of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , in: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen, 13 (2006), pp. 25 ff.

Web links

• Literature about Siegfried Witte in the state bibliography MV