Franz Etzel

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1957 election poster

Franz Etzel (born August 12, 1902 in Wesel ; † May 9, 1970 in Wittlaer near Düsseldorf ) was a German politician ( CDU ). He was Federal Minister of Finance from 1957 to 1961 .

education and profession

In addition to his school days, Etzel, who was Protestant , also worked as a miner. After graduating from high school in 1922, Etzel completed a law degree , which he completed in 1925 with the first state examination and in 1930 with the second state examination . From 1930 he worked as a lawyer and from 1939 also as a notary in Duisburg . From 1939 to 1945 he took part in the Second World War as a soldier , most recently as a first lieutenant in the infantry.

From 1961 until his death he was personally liable partner of the Friedrich Simon bank in Düsseldorf. In addition, since leaving the ministerial office, he has taken on several board positions. His estate is partly in the Federal Archives and partly in the Archive for Christian Democratic Politics in the Konrad Adenauer Foundation .

Political party

During the Weimar Republic Etzel was first a member of the NSDAP , from which he resigned in 1927, and then the DNVP , where he served as youth leader in the Lower Rhine regional association from 1931 to 1933.

In 1945 Etzel was one of the founders of the CDU in Duisburg and headed its district association until 1949. From 1946 to 1949 he was a member of the executive board of the CDU North Rhine and the zone committee of the CDU in the British occupation zone, and from 1947 to 1949 he was also chairman of the CDU's economic committee in the British zone. Under his leadership, the committee drafted the Düsseldorf guiding principles on the social market economy, which marked a clear departure from the Christian socialism of the Ahlen program and which represent the actual programmatic basis of the social market economy. In terms of his economic and political ideas, Etzel was closer to Alfred Müller-Armack than to Ludwig Erhard .

In 1950 Etzel became chairman of the newly established federal committee for economic policy of the CDU. The committee conveyed ideas about the economy and, above all, offered support to Ludwig Erhard, who lacked the inclination and probably also the ability to secure a broad base in his own parliamentary group. One of the main results of Etzel's work was the Investment Aid Act of 1952, which significantly promoted capital formation in German companies through expanded depreciation options. The self-financing made possible in this way was urgently required for the expansion of the German economy, but also earned Etzel the reputation of being a man of industry.

MP

From 1949 to January 4, 1953 and again from 1957 to 1965 Etzel was a member of the German Bundestag . From 1949 to October 8, 1952, he was chairman of the economic committee and deputy chairman of the committee pursuant to Article 15 of the Basic Law ("Socialization Committee") . From 1961 to 1965 Etzel was chairman of the working group for finance and tax issues of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group .

Franz Etzel moved into the Bundestag in 1949 as a directly elected member of the Rees – Dinslaken constituency . In 1957 and 1961 he won the direct mandate in the constituency of Remscheid – Solingen .

Public offices

From 1952 to 1957 he was Vice President of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). In this function he played a key role in the establishment of the EEC . However, he got into a dispute with Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard about the design of European cooperation, who rejected deeper state cooperation at European level.

The successful activity at the European level in combination with his conceptual competence made Etzel "ministrabel" when he returned to the Bundestag in 1957. Since the establishment of a European Ministry failed because of the departmental selfishness of Erhard and Heinrich von Brentano and there was also tension between Federal Finance Minister Fritz Schäffer and Federal Chancellor Adenauer , Etzel was considered as the new Finance Minister. In a letter to Adenauer dated June 4, 1956, he had already recommended himself for his successor through clearly audible criticism of Schäffer's policy of reducing liquidity. Schäffer had kept strict budgetary discipline, but did not allow the saved amounts to flow back into the economic cycle, but withdrew them from the money market ("Juliusturm"). Etzel countered this with his own concept for capital market and asset policy, for which he received a lot of encouragement at the CDU's first business day on July 18, 1957.

After the federal elections in 1957, he was appointed Federal Minister of Finance in the federal government led by Adenauer on October 29, 1957 . As finance minister, he was able to implement essential elements of his ideas. The accumulated cash surpluses of the federal government were not only used without endangering the stability of the D-Mark , but also made a decisive contribution to the fact that the expenditures necessary for rearmament did not have to be borrowed.

The successful implementation of a largely self-designed tax reform is probably Etzel's most important achievement. It is likely to be the most consistently thought-out reorganization of the tax system in the history of the Federal Republic, in which a new income tax tariff with significantly reduced rates with reduced corporate taxation was combined. The savings bonus law of 1959 flanked the relief for industry by promoting private asset accumulation: Etzel also implemented the social component of the CDU economic program in his area.

These undisputed successes - in the income taxation Etzel's reorganization lasted until 1990 - and his mediation between politics and business made Etzel one of the most prominent ministers in the cabinet within the next two years. When Adenauer toyed with the idea of ​​becoming Federal President himself in the spring of 1959, he brought Etzel up for discussion as his successor. In addition to the recognition for his achievements, the wish to prevent a Chancellor Erhard also played a role in these considerations.

The short-term role as a potential successor to Adenauer marked the turning point in Etzel's political career. In 1959, Etzel gave in to pressure from the Union parliamentary group on the issue of provisions for war victims without consulting the competent cabinet colleagues, not open to conflict and not strong enough to defend his own ideas. Etzel's own formulation that he would pursue a budget policy “on the verge of deficit”, which was actually intended as a counter-position to the hoarding policy of his predecessor Schäffer, now turned against him. In addition, he was very unhappy about the publicly controversial issue of the revaluation of the Deutschmark. Politically stricken, he resigned from the federal government on November 14, 1961.

Honors

In 1966 Etzel was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin . In his birthplace Wesel, Franz-Etzel-Platz in front of the train station is named after him.

Others

Etzel was a member of the Strasbourg Turnerschaft Cheruscia Munich.

Publications

  • The investment problem in the basic industries, German Industrial Institute, 1952.
  • Status and problems of economic integration , Deutsche Industrieverlagsgesellschaft, 1958.
  • Targets of the tax reform , Furche-Verlag, 1959.
  • Good money through good politics , Seewald, 1959.
  • With Europe for Freedom and Unity , Deutsche Industrieverlagsgesellschaft, 1959.
  • Financial policy in the force field between internal and external security , 1960
  • Financial Policy, Foreign Trade and Integration , 1960
  • Financial policy in the boom , 1960.
  • The Christian Foundations of Economic and Financial Policy , 1960.
  • Tax increases , Eichholz-Verlag, 1963.
  • 16 years of SPD tax policy , 1965.

literature

  • Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 94f.
  • Alfred Müller-Armack / Herbert B. Schmidt (ed.): Economic and financial policy under the sign of the social market economy. Festival ceremony for Franz Etzel , Stuttgart-Degerloch 1967.
  • Yorck Dietrich: Franz Etzel as a financial politician , in: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen 2 (1995), pp. 173–187 ( online ; PDF; 1.5 MB).
  • Ulrich Enders: Integration or Cooperation? Ludwig Erhard and Franz Etzel in the dispute over the policy of European cooperation 1954-1956 , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997), pp. 143–171 ( online ; PDF; 1.3 MB).
  • Klaus Gotto: Franz Etzel , in: Kempf, Udo / Merz, Hans-Georg (ed.): Chancellor and Minister 1949–1998. Biographical Lexicon of the German Federal Governments, Wiesbaden 2001, pp. 245–248.

See also

Web links

Commons : Franz Etzel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BT-Drs. 17/8134 of December 14, 2011: The Federal Government's answer to the major question from the Die Linke ea .: “Dealing with the Nazi past” , p. 13 ( PDF ).
personal data
SURNAME Etzel, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DNVP, CDU), Member of the Bundestag
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Wesel , Lower Rhine
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1970
Place of death Wittlaer