Wilhelm Elfes

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Wilhelm Elfes (seated, far right) at the Congress of the Center Party (1920)

Wilhelm Elfes (born June 5, 1884 in Krefeld , † November 22, 1969 in Mönchengladbach ) was a German politician ( ZENTRUM , CDU , Bund der Deutschen , DFU ). He is the father of the artist Will Elfes (1924–1971).

Life and work

Elfes did an apprenticeship as a blacksmith and locksmith journeyman. From 1909 he was a workers' secretary in the Catholic labor movement ( KAB ), in which he had been involved since 1904. In 1911 he became editor of the Westdeutsche Arbeiterzeitung , the weekly newspaper of the KAB, of which he took over as editor in 1919. In 1927 he became the police chief of Krefeld. He was dismissed from this office in 1933 for political reasons. Elfes made his way through the National Socialist era as a cigar dealer and later as a sales representative in the food sector. He was in contact with the attackers on July 20, 1944 and was temporarily detained after the attack. Then he hid in the rectory of St. Tönis for five months . The American secret service officer Saul K. Padover interviewed him there in February or March 1945 and reported on the encounter in his autobiographical work Experiment in Germany in 1946 .

From 1948 to 1951 Elfes published the Westdeutsche Zeitung together with Andreas Hermes as the license holder . After founding the German People's Newspaper of the Federation of Germans, he worked as a commentator for the paper until his death. In 1949 he took part in the founding of the Society for the Reunification of Germany , which advocated the opening of negotiations with the GDR. In 1964 he became a member of the World Peace Council . In the same year he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leipzig .

Political party

Elfes joined the Center Party in 1905. From 1922 to 1926 Elfes was a member of the Reich executive committee. During the Nazi era, he joined the Cologne Circle , a Catholic resistance group around Andreas Hermes and Jakob Kaiser .

After 1945 he helped found the CDU. Because of Konrad Adenauer's policy of integration with the West , he came into conflict with the party line and was expelled in 1951. Thereupon he founded the German Collection in 1952 and in 1953, with the former Chancellor Joseph Wirth, the national-neutralist Association of Germans , which opposed the politics of the federal government. From 1953 to 1963 he officiated first with Wirth and from 1956 with Thea Arnold as national chairman of this party. In the 1961 federal elections , he ran unsuccessfully for the German Peace Union, which he co-founded in 1960 alongside his BdD membership. In 1968 he was involved in founding the electoral alliance Action Democratic Progress for the 1969 federal election .

MP

From 1919 to 1933 Elfes was a city councilor in Mönchengladbach and from 1920 to 1933 a member of the provincial parliament of the Rhine Province . From 1921 to 1933 he was also a member of the Prussian State Council . From 1947 to 1950 Elfes was a member of the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia .

Public offices

1945 and 1946 to 1948 Elfes was Lord Mayor , 1946 Oberstadtdirektor of Mönchengladbach.

Elfes judgment

When Elfes applied for an extension of his passport in 1953 in order to go to a congress abroad, he was refused this without further explanation with reference to Section 7 (1) No. 1 Passport Act - the specific background was his commitment or - from the point of view of the authorities at the time - his agitation, for example in the Federation of Germans, against the policy of the federal government, which he also intended to pursue at corresponding events abroad. The action brought against it remained unsuccessful until the Federal Administrative Court , as was the subsequent constitutional complaint . The Elfes judgment of January 16, 1957 is still relevant today for all cases in which the freedom to leave the country (outflow of general freedom of action , Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law ) is to be restricted for foreign policy reasons .

literature

Publications

  • I ask for the floor. For discussion with my friends . Mönchengladbach 1945.

About Elfes

  • Albert Esser: Wilhelm Elfes 1884–1969. Labor leaders and politicians . Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, Mainz 1990, ISBN 3-7867-1495-9 ( Publications of the Commission for Contemporary History B 53), (At the same time: Cologne, Univ., Diss., 1989).
  • Wolfgang Löhr: Wilhelm Elfes. 1884–1969, in: Zeitgeschichte in Lebensbildern Vol. 5, Mainz 1982, pp. 239–252.
  • Saul K. Padover : Lie Detector. "Interrogations in defeated Germany 1944/45" . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-8218-4478-7 (interview with Willi Elfes, pages 256-265).
  • Dirk Mellies: Trojan horses of the GDR? The neutralist-pacifist network of the early Federal Republic and the Deutsche Volkszeitung. 1953-1973 . Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-631-55825-6 , ( European university publications , series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences 1039).

On the Elfes judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court

  • Gunther Rojahn: Elfes - More than a judgment. Loading and unloading of a political issue (doctoral thesis jur. FU Berlin). The online publication is available here .

Web links

Wikisource: Elfes Judgment  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New York 1946. German under the title "Liegendetektor. Interviews in defeated Germany 1944/45", Frankfurt / M. 1999, pp. 256-265
  2. ↑ BVerfGE 6, 32
personal data
SURNAME Elfes, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (Center, CDU, German Collection, Federation of Germans, DFU), Member of the State Parliament
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Krefeld
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1969
Place of death Mönchengladbach