Ernst Lemmer

Ernst Lemmer 1962

Memorial plaque at his former place of residence, Schützallee 135, in Berlin-Zehlendorf

Ernst Lemmer (born April 28, 1898 in Remscheid , † August 18, 1970 in West Berlin ) was a German journalist and politician ( DDP or DStP, later CDU ). From 1956 to 1957 he was Federal Minister for Post and Telecommunications , from 1957 to 1962 Federal Minister for Pan-German Issues and from 1964 to 1965 Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims .

Life

Lemmer was born as the son of the building contractor and architect Ernst Lemmer. He attended the Realgymnasium in Remscheid, where he also passed the Abitur (" Notabitur ") in 1914. At the age of 16, he joined the army as a war volunteer in 1914. He took part in the First World War, was highly decorated and retired as a lieutenant .

From 1919 to 1923 he studied theology , history and economics at the Philipps University in Marburg and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . In Marburg he became a member of the Leipzig Alsatia in the Burschenbunds-Convent . From April 1922 until the unions were smashed in 1933, he was general secretary of the union ring of German workers ', salaried employees and civil servants' associations , the umbrella organization of the liberal Hirsch-Duncker trade associations .

During his studies he worked as a volunteer for the Frankfurter Zeitung , then from 1922 for various Berlin newspapers, including the Berliner Tageblatt . In 1933 he was expelled from the Reich Association of the German Press because of his left-wing liberal convictions, and was then no longer able to work for German newspapers. He became a correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) and from 1938 to 1944 a reporter for the Pester Lloyd in Berlin . As an NZZ correspondent, he often traveled to Switzerland for editorial meetings. In addition, he was in regular contact with the Swiss military attaché Dr. Peter Burckhardt. In a CIA report he is counted among the main informants of George Blun and thus to the intelligence network of the Red Three . Lemmer forwarded information about the Holocaust abroad.

After the Second World War , Lemmer was initially the third chairman of the Free German Trade Union Confederation , but was dismissed as early as 1947. Lemmer organized the municipal administration in Kleinmachnow after the end of the war.

In 1949 he left the Soviet occupation zone on the advice of the German-American official Ulrich Biel , moved to West Berlin and became editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Der Kurier .

Lemmer was one of the signatories of the call to found the Kuratorium Indivisible Germany , which was founded on June 14, 1954 in Bad Neuenahr . He was involved in founding the German-Israeli Society and was appointed to its first board of trustees in 1966. From 1967 to 1970 he was Protestant Chairman of the Berlin Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation . On April 28, 1968, he was awarded the Ernst Reuter plaque .

Honorary grave, Potsdamer Chaussee 75, in Berlin-Nikolassee

Lemmer is buried in the forest cemetery in Zehlendorf in an honorary grave of the state of Berlin . After him, the Ernst-Lemmer-Ring in Berlin-Zehlendorf and Ernst-Lemmer-Strasse u. a. named in Düsseldorf and Marburg . His son Henning Lemmer was a district councilor in Berlin-Steglitz and a member of the Berlin House of Representatives. His daughter Ingeborg, a doctor, had been married since 1948 to the television journalist and ZDF presenter Gerhard Löwenthal (1922–2002), who had survived the Third Reich as a Jew in the Berlin underground. His nephew Gerd Ludwig Lemmer was Lord Mayor of Remscheid (1961–1963), North Rhine-Westphalian Minister for Federal Affairs (1962–1966) and State Secretary in various federal ministries (1967–1969).

Political party

Lemmer became a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP) in November 1918. In 1919 he joined the Reich Association of German Democratic Youth (Young Democrats) . During his studies he was chairman of the German Democratic Student Union, from 1924 chairman of the Young Democrats. In this office he was a member of the Reich Executive Committee of the DDP from 1924 to 1930 . After its renaming, he was a member of the Reich Executive Committee of the German State Party (DStP) . His advocacy of the controversial construction of the battleship A led in 1928 to a campaign to be voted out of chairman of the Young Democrats , especially by Erich Lüth , a staunch opponent of the armament plans.

After the Second World War , Lemmer was one of those who took the path from the former DDP to the CDU and not to one of the liberal successor parties that eventually became part of the FDP . He was one of the founders of the CDU. On January 4, 1946, the Soviet military administration appointed him 2nd chairman of the CDU in the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ) after the previous chairmen Andreas Hermes and Walther Schreiber had been deposed for opposing the land reform . In the same year he was involved in the establishment of the Unionhilfswerk in Berlin, whose current headquarters in Richard-Sorge-Strasse as Ernst-Lemmer-Haus is now named after him. On December 20, 1947, he and the first chairman Jakob Kaiser were deposed by the Soviet military administration for their resistance to the People's Congress movement . Together with Kaiser, Lemmer tried to continue working in the East German CDU from West Berlin. When this became less and less successful, both founded the CDU in exile , together with other Christian Democrats who had fled their power in East Germany . This saw itself as the legal board of the CDU in the Soviet occupation zone, even if it was not recognized there. At the founding party convention of the Federal CDU in Goslar in 1950 , the CDU in exile was recognized as representing the interests of the East German Christian Democrats and placed on an equal footing with a regional association.

From 1950 to 1956 Lemmer was deputy state chairman, then until 1961 chairman of the state association of the CDU in Berlin. From 1961 until his death in 1970 Lemmer was finally chairman of the CDU in exile.

MP

In 1918 he was a member of the Remscheid workers 'and soldiers' council . Lemmer was a member of the Reichstag from December 1924 to November 1932 and March to July 1933 . On March 23, 1933, he voted together with the four other Reichstag members of the German State Party ( Hermann Dietrich , Theodor Heuss , Heinrich Landahl and Reinhold Maier ) for the so-called Enabling Act .

From 1946 to 1949 Lemmer was a member of the Brandenburg State Parliament , from 1950 to November 15, 1969 in the Berlin House of Representatives , where he was chairman of the CDU parliamentary group until 1956 .

Lemmer was a member of the German Bundestag from the increase in the number of Berlin MPs on February 1, 1952 until his death.

On November 16, 1954 was the unique in the Bundestag event that two party colleagues against each other for the office of President of the Bundestag as candidates: Lemmer joined proposed by the FDP -Abgeordneten Hans Reif , against the "official" CDU / CSU candidate Eugen Gerstenmaier and only lost in the third ballot (Gerstenmaier: 204, Lemmer: 190, abstentions: 15). From February 12, 1963 to February 19, 1964 he was deputy chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group.

From 1953 Lemmer was also a delegate to the Council of Europe .

Lemmer 1961 as Federal Minister for All German Issues

Public offices

1945/46 he was mayor of the Brandenburg community of Kleinmachnow .

From November 15, 1956 to October 29, 1957 he was Federal Minister for Post and Telecommunications in Konrad Adenauer's second cabinet , and then from October 29, 1957 to December 11, 1962, Federal Minister for All-German Issues . From February 19, 1964 to October 26, 1965, he was Federal Minister for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims in Ludwig Erhard's first cabinet . From 1966 to 1969, Lemmer finally served as Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger's special representative for Berlin .

Publications (selection)

• Reparation burdens? The Dawes report and internal politics, in: Berliner Tageblatt weekly edition for foreign countries and overseas, September 25, 1924, p. 1.
• Berlin at the crossroads of Europe, the crossroads of the world. Verlag Haupt & Puttkammer, Berlin 1957.
• The unwanted state. Why the Weimar Republic failed. In: The political opinion , 12/1967, pp. 46–53.
• Some things were different. Memories of a German Democrat. Heinrich Scheffler Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1968 (new edition by Langen Müller, Munich 1996).
• Skat tactics. Experiences and thoughts of a passionate skat player. Ass-Verlag, Leinfelden near Stuttgart 1969.

Honors

• Ernst Lemmer Institute - Young Politics Association
• Ernst Lemmer House

literature

• Werner Breunig, Siegfried Heimann , Andreas Herbst : Biographical Handbook of Berlin City Councilors and Members of Parliament 1946–1963 (=  series of publications by the Berlin State Archives . Volume 14 ). Landesarchiv Berlin , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-9803303-4-3 , p. 166 (331 pages).
• Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 155 ff.
• Ludwig Luckemeyer:  Lemmer, Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 187 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Short biography for:  Lemmer, Ernst . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Ernst Lemmer  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ernst Lemmer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Ernst Lemmer in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Ernst Lemmer in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Biography on the website of the Ernst Lemmer Institute
• Against an opponent of Hitler . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 1947, p. 15 ( online ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Konrad Adenauer Foundation: Ernst Lemmer: Journalist, Federal Minister .
2. ↑ Konrad Adenauer Foundation: ibid .
3. ^ Kurt Naumann: Directory of the members of the old gentlemen's association of BC Munich e. V. and all other former BCers as well as the old men of the Wiener SC . Saarbrücken, Christmas 1962, p. 35.
4. ↑ Konrad Adenauer Foundation: ibid .
5. ^ CIA report: The Red Three. .
6. ^ Bernward Dörner : The Germans and the Holocaust. What nobody wanted to know, but everyone could know. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-549-07315-5 , p. 280.
7. ↑ Address at the ceremony 60 years CDU Kleinmachnow. (PDF; 104 kB) CDU Kleinmachnow, June 22, 2005, accessed on September 3, 2019 . 
8. ^ Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Berlin e. V. Board members since 1949. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on April 2, 2015 ; Retrieved July 12, 2014 . 
9. ↑ Konrad Adenauer Foundation: ibid .
10. ↑ Konrad Adenauer Foundation: ibid .
11. ^ Ernst-Lemmer-Institut - Fördererkreis Junge Politik eV District Office Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.
12. ^ Website of the Ernst Lemmer Institute .