Alfred Dregger

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Alfred Dregger (1982)
Alfred Dregger (1973)

Alfred Dregger (* 10. December 1920 in Münster ; † 29. June 2002 in Fulda ) was a German politician of the CDU . He was mayor of Fulda from 1956 to 1970 and from 1982 to 1991 chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group .

Life

education and profession

After attending the Marien-Gymnasium Werl (from 1937 German high school for boys) Dregger was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 . In 1940 he became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 7,721,518 ). Until the end of the war he served as a soldier, most recently as a captain and battalion commander . Dregger began studying law and political science in Tübingen and Marburg in 1946 , which he completed in 1949 with the first state examination in law. In 1953 he passed the second state examination in law . As early as 1950 he was with the previous company with a thesis on the subject of liability relationships. The legal effects of f.AG, GmbH, cooperative and association before their entry in the reg. Legal acts carried out to Dr. jur. been awarded a doctorate . From 1954 to 1956 he worked as a speaker, first at the Federation of German Industries and then at the German Association of Cities . From 1970 to 1983 he was a board member at Überlandwerk Fulda AG .

Political party

Dregger was a member of the CDU and from 1967 to 1982 the state chairman of the CDU Hessen . As such, he was a top candidate for his party four times. He succeeded in increasing the CDU's share of the vote, which had only been 26.4% when he took office in 1967, to 47.5% (1974) in just a few years. Nevertheless, under his chairmanship, the CDU did not succeed in gaining a government majority against Albert Osswald ( 1970 and 1974 ) or against Holger Börner ( 1978 and 1982 ). In 1969 he also became a member of the federal executive committee and was deputy federal chairman of the CDU from 1977 to 1983. Dregger was a prominent representative of the national conservative wing of the CDU, commonly known as " Stahlhelmer ".

MP

Alfred Dregger (left), 1987 with Franz Josef Strauss at an election campaign event

From 1962 to 1972 Dregger was a member of the Hessian Landtag , from 1972 to 1998 he was a member of the German Bundestag . Here Dregger immediately became a member of the board of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group . In 1976 he was elected deputy chairman and, after the political reunification in Bonn, in October 1982, he was elected chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group as the successor to the previous incumbent, Helmut Kohl, who had been elected chancellor . Dregger held this office until November 1991. His successor was the previous Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble .

In the 1972 federal election, Alfred Dregger was still elected to the German Bundestag via the state list of Hesse and then always as a directly elected member of the Fulda constituency . Most recently, he received 55.1% of the first votes cast in the 1994 federal election .

His office manager Günter Reichert was President of the Federal Agency for Civic Education from 1992 to 1998 .

Although his health was already very weak, Dregger wanted to move into the Bundestag again in 1998 to open the first session as old-age president . Only after months of internal party quarrels did he withdraw his candidacy. His successor as a constituency member was Martin Hohmann .

Public offices

From 1956 to 1970 Dregger was Lord Mayor of Fulda. In 1970 he became an honorary citizen of the city of Fulda .

family

Alfred Dregger was born in Münster as the son of a publishing director. His father Alfred Dregger, born in Günne (Möhnesee), worked as a Wehrmacht officer at the Reichswehr replacement office in Soest before the war . His mother Anna Dregger, b. Sasse, came from a farming family from Westönn. Alfred Dregger spent part of his youth in his parents' house in Werl-Westönnen (Am Börn). His brother has been missing on the Eastern Front since World War II . Alfred Dregger married in 1952. He had three children with his wife Dagmar, a graduate economist; the eldest son Wolfgang died in a traffic accident in 1972.

His son Burkard has been chairman of the CDU parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives since June 2018 .

Positions

During his time as an active politician, Alfred Dregger was the most prominent representative of the national conservative wing of the CDU.

Security policy

Within the European Communities he called for a European Security Union as a strong European pillar of NATO . The security policy formulated by him served to maintain the peace with fewer and fewer weapons, so included a balanced disarmament policy . In particular, he turned against special nuclear threats to the Federal Republic of Germany, because “Germany cannot be defended atomically, but it can be destroyed”. He therefore urged the disarmament of both Soviet medium- range missiles and France's abandonment of the Hadès and Pluton short-range systems .

Left Terrorism and Radical Decree

In the 1970s, Dregger was a strong advocate for the implementation of the radical decree ; otherwise, in his opinion, a ban on the DKP would be necessary. During the German autumn of 1977 Dregger had called for the establishment of a “terrorist hunting command”, which had to be “exempt from bureaucratic interference”.

Evaluation of the Second World War

Dregger was accused of lack of insight and historical ignorance, especially with regard to the role of the Wehrmacht in National Socialism . As chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, he declared that Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union was not fundamentally wrong, but was unfortunately conceived as a war of conquest rather than a war of liberation. He campaigned for the release of German war criminals, such as Ferdinand from Fünten and Franz Fischer . He called the traveling exhibition The Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944 an “attack on Germany”. Dregger was one of the signatories of the appeal "Against forgetting" initiated by journalists Klaus Rainer Röhl , Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht as well as historian Rainer Zitelmann on May 8, 1995 , in which the Allies used the term "liberation" for the end of the war as “one-sided” was questioned.

Wehrmacht exhibition

Dregger campaigned for a "normalization" of historical awareness in Germany. This much-criticized engagement aims at a partial relativization of the National Socialist crimes and a shift in focus towards a positive national identity in Germany. Accordingly, Dregger sued for "elementary patriotism " against what he believed to be a lack of history and ruthlessness towards one's own nation in Germany. His goal was a “national regeneration” against the “coming to terms with the past” criticized by him in the form. His search for identifying aspects of the Second World War was the reason for his criticism of the traveling exhibition The Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944 , which destroyed the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” .

Publications

  • Freedom in our time. Speeches and essays . Herbig, Munich 1980.
  • The price of freedom. Security Policy in a Divided Europe . Universitas-Verlag , Munich 1985, ISBN 3-8004-1134-2 .
  • An alley for reason. Politics for Germany. Speeches and essays . Universitas-Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-8004-1132-6 .
  • Unity and justice and freedom. Contributions to German-European unity . Universitas-Verlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-8004-1283-7 .
  • Dilemma of the front soldiers. Against the cynical one-sidedness of the national masochists. in Junge Freiheit 95/15, p. 2.
  • My look ahead . Naumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-88567-084-4 .

Awards

Honorary grave of Dr. Alfred Dregger in Fulda, Frauenberg cemetery

Following an application by the Junge Union and a resolution by the state party congress in 2007, the state office of the Hessian CDU in Wiesbaden has been called the Alfred Dregger House since August 20, 2010 .

The Alfred Dregger Medal has been awarded by the CDU State Association of Hesse since 2013 .

His grave of honor is in the Frauenberg cemetery .

literature

  • Angela Keller-Kühne: Alfred Dregger. In: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , history of the CDU (with online finding aid, as of 2015).
  • Jochen Lengemann : The Hessen Parliament 1946–1986 . Biographical handbook of the advisory state committee, the state assembly advising the constitution and the Hessian state parliament (1st – 11th electoral period). Ed .: President of the Hessian State Parliament. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-458-14330-0 , p. 237 ( hessen.de [PDF; 12.4 MB ]).
  • Jochen Lengemann: MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , p. 111.
  • Michael Mott : A thoroughbred politician who polarized / Alfred Dregger (1920 to 2002): Lord Mayor, CDU regional leader, CDU / CSU parliamentary group leader. In: Fuldaer Zeitung , October 7, 2009, p. 13 (Series: Fuldaer Köpfe).
  • Günter Reichert , Dieter Weirich , Werner Wolf (Eds.): Alfred Dregger. Champion for Germany . Ullstein, Berlin a. a. 1991, ISBN 3-550-07413-1 .
  • Dieter Weirich: Alfred Dregger. Attitude and Heart - A Biography , Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag 2019, ISBN 978-3-95542-339-1 .

Web links

Commons : Alfred Dregger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Peter Klausch : Brown legacy. Nazi past Hessian state parliament member 1st – 11th Electoral term (1946–1987) . The Left Group in the Hessian State Parliament, Wiesbaden 2011 ( Download [PDF; 4.2 MB ]).
  2. ↑ Achim Schwarze: Thin board drill in Bonn - From the dissertations of our elite. Eichborn-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1984, p. 108.
  3. ^ Rejection to "Stahlhelm Group" , Der Spiegel , March 4, 1985
  4. ↑ "If I were German, I would scream" , Der Spiegel , January 5, 1987
  5. ↑ CDU politician: Alfred Dregger is dead , FAZ June 30, 2002
  6. ↑ Tradition: The steel helmet wing of the Hessian CDU , shaped by Alfred Dregger , HaGalil October 4, 2004
  7. ^ A b Alfred Dregger honored posthumously , by Pitt von Bebenburg, Frankfurter Rundschau August 16, 2010
  8. ↑ http://www.jf-archiv.de/archiv/40aa6.htm
  9. ↑ Django, officer and gentleman
  10. ↑ The citizen calls for harsher punishments . In: Der Spiegel. Born 1977/39
  11. ^ Die Welt , September 13, 1977, quoted from Kölnische Rundschau: The Republic in a State of Emergency , accessed on November 22, 2013.
  12. ↑ Kurt Nelhiebel: The brown thread. In: Blätter for German and international politics, 6, 2010, pp. 107–115.
  13. ↑ Dan Diner: Between Aporia and Apology. Beyond the limits of the historicizability of National Socialism. In: ders. (Ed.): Is National Socialism History? On historicization and historians' dispute. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 62-73.
  14. ↑ fuldaerzeitung.de: Hessen-CDU honors Alfred Dregger  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed August 20, 2010.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.fuldaerzeitung.de  
  15. ↑ t-online.de: CDU renames the state office to “Alfred Dregger House” ( memento from August 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 17, 2010.
  16. ^ Alfred Dregger Medal in Silver and Gold Press release from the CDU Hessen
personal data
SURNAME Dregger, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), Member of the Bundestag, Member of the Bundestag
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Muenster
DATE OF DEATH June 29, 2002
Place of death Fulda