Franz Wiedemeier

Franz Wiedemeier

Franz Wiedemeier (born May 1, 1890 in Steinheim in Westphalia, † September 8, 1970 in Ulm ) was a German politician of the center and the CDU .

education and profession

In his childhood, Wiedemeier attended elementary school in Steinheim in Westphalia. From 1904 to 1908 he learned the carpentry trade. He then practiced his profession at home and abroad until the outbreak of the First World War . During this time he continued his education by attending technical colleges and adult education centers and by taking part in teaching courses of a social, economic and state-political nature. In 1914 he married.

After the First World War , in which he was deployed on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 , Wiedemeier took over the office of secretary of the Central Association of Christian Factory and Transport Workers with its official seat in Ulm. He carried out this activity until the National Socialists came to power in 1933. From 1928, Wiedemeier also acted as the district board of Catholic workers' associations. In addition, there were various public honorary posts: Wiedemeier was a member of the local school council and the award committee, as well as a labor judge at the labor court in Ulm and a member of the assessor committee.

Political activity

Wiedemeier was politically active in the Catholic Center Party since the 1920s . After he had become a member of the Ulm city council in 1929, he entered the Reichstag with the election of September 1930 , to which he was to belong for almost three years, until November 1933, as a member of constituency 31 (Württemberg). As a member of parliament, Wiedemeier voted, among other things, for the Enabling Act of March 1933 introduced by the Hitler government , which was supposed to form the legal basis for the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.

After the Second World War , Wiedemeier founded the CDU's local group in Ulm, initially known as Christian Social Union, with the approval of the American military government of southern Germany , which he was to chair for many years. For this he sat from 1946 to 1964 in the Ulm municipal council. He was a member of the provisional parliament , the state constituent assembly and the state parliament of Württemberg-Baden . From 1952 to 1964, with an interruption from 1960 to 1961, he was a member of the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg .

In his old age and after his death, Wiedemeier was honored several times: in 1954 he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit and the city of Ulm named a street after him. Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard , who began his career in southern Germany and worked closely with Wiedemeier there, praised Wiedemeier as the "always loyal Ekkehard, on whose devotion and loyalty, but also on his rich experience, I could always build". According to reports from 2007, Wiedemeier's negligence was probably responsible for the fact that Erhard - although "Chancellor of the CDU" - never officially became a member of the party: according to this, Erhard had informally declared his entry into the party in 1946 to Wiedemeier, who said it on a note held on. Since Wiedemeier never gave the notification of entry to the party files, but kept it to himself, membership was never made official. Since the note could no longer be found after Wiedemeier's death in 1970, the only (possible) evidence of Erhard's - nowhere else recorded - entry into the party must be considered lost.

Web links

• Franz Wiedemeier in the database of members of the Reichstag

literature

• Frank Raberg: Franz Wiedemeier (1890-1970). A Christian democrat in the state and party politics of the German southwest. In: Ulm and Upper Swabia. 50th year 1996, ISSN  0342-2364 , pp. 243-306.
• Frank Raberg : Biographical Lexicon for Ulm and Neu-Ulm 1802-2009 . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft im Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7995-8040-3 , p. 467 f .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The by-election in Waiblingen on March 12, 1961 gave the CDU a further mandate, which fell to the constituency of Ulm-Stadt and thus.
2. ↑ See http://www.cduadu.de/index.php?ka=1&ska=2&idn=72 .
3. ↑ Ludwig Erhard was never a member of the CDU. In: DIE WELT of April 25, 2007 - Internet version - accessed on January 18, 2009.