Franz Thoma

Franz Thoma (born July 30, 1886 in Gröbming ; † July 10, 1966 in Graz ) was an Austrian politician .

Life

Franz Thoma came from an old Bavarian brewery family from Landsberg am Lech . His grandfather had settled in Grobming. After training as a textile technician and stays abroad in Germany and Switzerland, he completed a specialist agricultural training course. During the First World War , he served as an officer from 1914 to 1918 , mainly on the Eastern Front, and was wounded several times.

At the end of the war, he took over his parents' farm (Thornhof) in Gröbming and politically joined the free-thinking and German-national Land Association . From 1919 he was a member of the Styrian state parliament with interruptions . There were also numerous functions in the economic and cooperative areas. For decades he was chairman of the “Styrian Brown Cattle Breeding Association ” and chairman of the innovative and commercially successful Ennstal cooperative, Stainach, which is now a major international company. Thoma was primarily involved in the areas of cattle breeding, cooperative merchandise management and the dairy and dairy industry and was recognized as a recognized agricultural specialist.

Even the new Nazi rulers did not want to do without him after 1938 and he kept positions in the dairy association and in the Chamber of Agriculture. In June 1938 he applied for a temporary membership card for the NSDAP . He was assigned the number 9,006,639. He was accepted into the NSDAP on January 1, 1940. From 1939 to the end of 1941, Thoma was called up as an officer in the Wehrmacht . Since he was urgently needed in his own business and in the management of the Styrian agricultural cooperatives, he was released from the military. After giving him the membership card “seriously”, his admission to the NSDAP was refused in February 1944. Conflicts with local NS party leaders meant that by 1945 he had resigned from almost all of his functions.

After 1945, Thoma was again at the head of the regional cooperatives and was soon also active at the state level. He changed his political home, and now immediately joined the the ÖVP belonging Bauernbund in to support a strong and politically unified farmer representative. The Landbund was no longer important after the Second World War. From 1948 Thoma was a member of the Styrian state government and from 1949 President of the State Parliament. In total, he was a member of the National Council for ten years .

On January 23, 1952, Thoma became the Austrian Federal Minister for Agriculture and Forestry and remained so for 7 ½ years. During these years of development and restructuring of Austrian agriculture, he played a decisive role in the greatest surge in modernization of agriculture in the 20th century. Maintaining the structure of Austrian agriculture, with the family business as the model of agricultural policy, was an important political concern for him.

Awards

• Ring of Honor of the State of Styria
• 1959: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

literature

• Franz Thoma , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 23/1970 from May 25, 1970, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Web links

• Franz Thoma on the website of the Austrian Parliament
• Archive recordings with Franz Thoma in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library (parliamentary debates)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Wladika : On the representation of politicians and mandataries with a Nazi past in the Austrian People's Party 1945–1980. A group biographical study. Research project on behalf of the Karl von Vogelsang Institute. Vienna 2018, p. 162f ( PDF ).