Erhard Hubener

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Erhard Hübener (born August 4, 1881 in Tacken , Westprignitz district , Brandenburg ; † June 3, 1958 in Bad Salzuflen , Lemgo district , North Rhine-Westphalia ) was a German politician ( DDP , LDPD ). From December 1946 to October 1949 he was the first prime minister of Saxony-Anhalt and the only non-communist head of government in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany.

Life

Hübener was born the son of a Protestant pastor. From 1894 he attended the grammar school in Seehausen in the Altmark, later the Pforta state school . In 1901 he graduated from high school there. He then studied history and economics and received his doctorate.

In the First World War he was an officer. After the war he joined the German Democratic Party (DDP). In 1919, at the instigation of Minister Otto Fischbeck, he became an employee in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. In 1922 he moved to the Prussian province of Saxony as deputy governor .

From 1922, Hübener became the incumbent governor of the Prussian province of Saxony. In 1924 he was elected to the office. He made a name for himself as an economic and administrative expert who sought consensus beyond party lines. He was concerned with a federal reorganization of Germany and proposed the establishment of a state of Saxony-Anhalt as early as the 1920s. In 1930 he was confirmed in office with the votes of Social Democrats , Democrats and German Nationals .

In 1933, Hübener was removed from office. Until the end of the “ Third Reich ” he devoted himself to artistic and scientific questions and wrote small papers under the pseudonym JS Erhard.

In 1945 the Americans reappointed him as governor. The Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) soon appointed him President of the Provincial Administration of the Province of Saxony. Hübener became a co-founder of the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD) in Halle an der Saale . On December 3, 1946, a majority of the LDPD and CDU in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt elected him as the only prime minister in the Soviet occupation zone who was not a member of the SED. For the Soviet occupying power he was an uncomfortable head of government. He turned against the land reform , the regulation of which he himself signed on September 3, 1945, and a schematic denazification . Erhard Hübener also temporarily held the office of Justice Minister of Saxony-Anhalt and in this function enabled Judge Dietrich Wilde to become in-house counsel at the Martin Luther University in Halle Wittenberg in 1947. On June 5, 1947, he played a key role in the first and last all-German Prime Minister's Conference in Munich , which dealt with the impending division of Germany. Hübener had threatened to resign if the SMAD did not allow the East German Prime Minister to travel. Contrary to his expectations, the West German minister-presidents, including his longtime liberal party friend Reinhold Maier , refused to take measures to maintain German unity in hours of discussion.

From then on, Hübener saw himself in a hopeless position. At the Third German People's Congress in May 1949, which, on the instructions of the SMAD, passed the constitution of the GDR , he appealed to the delegates as the main speaker of the LDPD: “Our future government should, will and must learn to stand on free ground with a free people. “ In August 1949 he announced his resignation as Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt on October 1, 1949. On October 10, 1949, he was solemnly adopted in an extraordinary session of the state parliament and Werner Bruschke was elected as his successor.

While many political friends fled to West Germany , Hübener stayed in the GDR. He had already been appointed professor for administrative studies (administrative theory and administrative science) in Halle (Saale) in 1946, but was unable to give lectures at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg until his retirement due to his position as Prime Minister. After retiring for reasons of age, he was still active as a professor of administrative law at the University of Halle. He also did not withdraw completely from politics, cultivated artistic and historical studies, wrote his autobiography, which was later published in the Federal Republic. Hübener died on June 3, 1958 during a spa stay in Bad Salzuflen. He was buried in Wernigerode , where he had lived for the past few years.

Hübener had been married to Otti Bornemann since 1909.

The Erhard Hübener Foundation , which is close to the FDP, is named after him. The state capital Magdeburg named a place next to the Hundertwasserhaus as Erhard-Hübener-Platz in his honor on the initiative of the FDP council faction in 2006 .

Fonts

  • Central Germany on the way to unity . 1927.
  • Circles of life. Apprenticeship and wandering years of a prime minister . (= Central German research. Volume 90). Böhlau, Cologne / Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-412-05483-6 .
  • Liberal matters as social responsibility . In: LDP information . 3rd 1949.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathias Tullner: Erhard Hübener and the Province of Saxony . Central Germany plans and imperial reform. In: Michael Richter, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, State Center for Civic Education Saxony (ed.): Länder, Gaue and districts. Central Germany in the 20th century . First edition. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Dresden 2007, ISBN 978-3-89812-530-7 , pp. 73–84 (here p. 73) .
  2. ↑ Bernd Sternal (ed.): In those years. Records of a Liberated German. Volume 2, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-8119-3 , p. 95.
  3. ↑ Interview with Prime Minister Hübener . In: Neues Deutschland , August 16, 1949, p. 4.
  4. ^ Change of Prime Minister . In: Berliner Zeitung , October 11, 1949, p. 2.
  5. ↑ Period from 1945 ff.
  6. ^ Resignation from office of Prof. Dr. Hübeners. In: New Time . August 16, 1949, p. 2.
  7. ↑ Hübener, Erhard. In: Who was who in the GDR? A biographical lexicon. 2006, ISBN 3-8289-0552-8 , p. 379, column 2.
personal data
SURNAME Hübener, Erhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politicians (DDP, LDPD), MdV
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Tackle
DATE OF DEATH June 3, 1958
Place of death Bad Salzuflen