Freiburg district (Nazi era)

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The Freiburg Circle was a group of ordoliberal economists - Adolf Lampe , Constantin von Dietze and Walter Eucken - as well as lawyers and a number of Protestant and Catholic Christians who met in an oppositional discussion group from December 1938 on the occasion of the November pogroms , the Freiburg Council . Dietze, Lampe and the historian Gerhard Ritter were also members of the Confessing Church . The Freiburg Circle included u. a. also Clemens Bauer , Franz Böhm , Friedrich Delekat , Otto Dibelius , Otto Hof , Friedrich Justus Perels , Helmut Thielicke , Erik Wolf , Ernst Wolf and Leonhard Miksch .

The council met every month between December 1938 and the arrests in October 1944. Each meeting consisted of a presentation followed by free discussion. They talked about topics relating to the economic and social order and above all about the question of how they should behave as Christians towards the Nazi state , which disregarded biblical commandments with inhumanity, claim to omnipotence , leadership cult , racism and the abuse of political violence and also a " Christian lifestyle ”made impossible.

Subgroup memorandum

In October 1942, the leadership of the Confessing Church commissioned the Freiburg Circle to develop principles of Christian social ethics for the reorganization of Germany for a future ecumenical world church conference. The memorandum should also, with the mediation of the Confessing Church, get into the hands of the war opponents in order to influence a post-war order. With this at the latest, the circle belonged to the resistance against National Socialism . Part of the group wrote a draft, which Carl Friedrich Goerdeler was invited to discuss .

At the beginning of 1943 this resulted in an extensive memorandum , written mainly by Böhm, Dietze, Lampe, Erik Wolf and Ritter, entitled Political Community Order : An attempt to reflect the Christian conscience in the political needs of our time . It included domestic and foreign policy as well as questions of social values. Service to others and freedom of conscience were key concepts; the relationship between state, society and the individual was interpreted in a personalistic way. In addition, a Christian right of resistance became a basic component of a future constitutional constitution . A key phrase read: “ There is no demon in need of taming and bondage more than the demon of power. "

Subgroup working group Erwin von Beckerath

Another subgroup, including Böhm, Dietze, Eucken, Lampe and Erich Preiser , started thinking about a future German economic order as the “ Arbeitsgemeinschaft Erwin von Beckerath ” since 1943 . As economists, finance and political scientists, they rejected both a central administration economy and the laissez-faire economic constitution . Erwin von Beckerath prepared an expert opinion for the transition from a planned economy to a market economy for the post-war period. Thus the Freiburg district made major theoretical preparation for the later of Ludwig Erhard established the social market economy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Arrests and Consequences

Because of their connection to Goerdeler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and their collaboration on the memorandum, a. Bauer, Dietze, Lampe, Perels and Ritter were arrested by the Gestapo after July 20, 1944 . Perels was sentenced to death , u. a. for failing to report plans to overthrow known to him , and shot in Berlin on the night of April 22nd to 23rd, 1945. The surviving members of the Freiburger Kreis exerted a great influence on the post-war order, especially on the economic constitution.

literature

  • Christine Blumenberg lamp: The economic program of the "Freiburg circles". Draft of a liberal-social post-war economy. Economists against National Socialism. Berlin 1973, ISBN 978-3-428-03025-5 .
  • Dagmar Rübsam, Hans Schadek (Ed.): The "Freiburg Circle". Resistance and Postwar Planning 1933-1945. Catalog of an exhibition (= publications from the archive of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau 29). Freiburg 1990.
  • Eckhard John, Bernd Martin, Marc Mück, Hugo Ott (eds.): The Freiburg University in the time of National Socialism. Freiburg 1991.
  • Nils Goldschmidt : The origin of the Freiburg circles . In: Historisch-Politik Mitteilungen 4, 1997, pp. 1–17 ( digitized version ).
  • Byong-Chol Lee: Economic Policy Concept of the Christian Democrats in South Baden 1945−1952. Diss. Phil. University, Freiburg 2000 Online; esp. pp. 18–45 (PDF; 1.1 MB).
  • Daniela Rüther: The resistance of July 20th on the way to the "social market economy". The economic policy ideas of the bourgeois opposition to Hitler. Schöningh, Paderborn 2002, ISBN 3-506-77529-4 .
  • Helge Peukert : July 20, 1944 and the economic and regulatory conceptions of the opposition to National Socialism. In: Perspektiven der Wirtschaftsppolitik Vol. 5, 2004, pp. 455–469.
  • Hans Maier (ed.): The Freiburg circles. Academic Resistance and Social Market Economy . Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-76953-4

See also

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ For the plural "circles" in the title and in comparison to other authors, see the illustration in Goldschmidt 1997.