Fritz Behrens

This article describes the German politician Fritz Behrens . For further meanings see Fritz Behrens (disambiguation)

Fritz Behrens (* 12. October 1948 in Göttingen ) is a German politician of the SPD . From 1995 to 2005 he was Minister of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in various departments .

Life

Education

Fritz Behrens in May 2002

Behrens studied from 1969 to 1974 at the Georg-August-University of Goettingen jurisprudence . After the first state examination in law, which he passed with excellent grades, in 1975 he started his legal preparatory service in Hanover in the State Chancellery of Lower Saxony under Prime Minister Ernst Albrecht . In 1976 he did his doctorate in Göttingen on the subject of “Legal bases of the environmental policy of the European Communities”; In 1977 he passed the second state examination in law. He dropped a career as a judge that he had initially striven for in order to work in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Activity in North Rhine-Westphalia

From 1977 Behrens worked in the State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia, initially as an assistant and from 1979 as personal advisor to the then head of the State Chancellery Herbert Schnoor . When he was appointed Minister of the Interior in 1980, Behrens moved with him to the Ministry of the Interior, where he worked as its personal advisor until 1983. From 1983 to 1986 he was personal advisor to Prime Minister Johannes Rau . In 1986 Behrens was appointed district president in Düsseldorf .

In 1995 Behrens, who has been a member of the SPD since 1972, was appointed Minister of Justice of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia ( Cabinet Rau V and Cabinet Clement I ). After the ministerial portfolios were redesigned in 1998, he was Minister of the Interior and Justice. After the Constitutional Court of North Rhine-Westphalia ruled on February 9, 1999 that the merging of interior and justice departments into one ministry was unconstitutional, this was reversed in March 1999. Jochen Dieckmann was appointed Minister of Justice (after Reinhard Rauball's intermezzo of one week ) . Fritz Behrens had been Interior Minister since then (Cabinet Clement I, Cabinet Clement II and Cabinet Steinbrück ) until he handed over the office to his successor Ingo Wolf on June 24 of the same year after the state elections won by the CDU and the FDP in 2005 .

Since January 2, 2003, Behrens was also a member of the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia , since 2005 via the state list of the SPD. Between 2005 and 2012 he was chairman of the culture committee. He moved up for the MP Renate Drewke , who became the district president in Arnsberg .

Due to the state elections on May 9, 2010, he moved back into the state parliament, Behrens did not run for the early elections in 2012 and thus left the NRW state parliament. Since then, Behrens has devoted himself to his profession as a lawyer ; Since July 2011 Fritz Behrens has also been President of the Kunststiftung NRW .

Behrens and the National Socialist Underground

Behrens' role during the existence of the right-wing extremist terror group National Socialist Underground was examined after its self-exposure at the end of 2011. Behrens appeared before the first NSU investigative committee of the Bundestag in November 2012 and was questioned about his role as Minister of the Interior, who is responsible for the state police, during the nail bomb attack in Cologne in June 2004. Behrens saw no failures in his administration during these weeks. He stated there that “in retrospect it was clear to him” that at that time there was a “political necessity” to “show the residents of Keupstrasse that he was concerned”. In the committee, Behrens denied having influenced the direction of the investigation. His question to the investigators at the time: "Why is the Office for the Protection of the Constitution switched on?" Was not asked with the intention of preventing an investigation, he said. Behrens rejected the allegation in the room of not having taken the attack seriously enough. According to the CDU chairman in the committee, Clemens Binninger , the investigation in Cologne missed possibly the greatest chance of tracking down the NSU murderers at an early stage. Instead, the investigative authorities concentrated exclusively on the search for perpetrators in the milieu of Turkish origin or in the suspected organized crime against foreigners.

Awards (selection)

On October 23, 2007, the then Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers , awarded Behrens the North Rhine-Westphalia Order of Merit .

Web links

Commons : Fritz Behrens  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Excerpts from the interrogation before the NSU committee of inquiry
• Fritz Behrens at the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament
• Literature by and about Fritz Behrens in the catalog of the German National Library

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1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Note in: Landtag internal, No. 1/2012 of January 25, 2012, p. 19
2. ↑ NSU Committee Crucial questions remain unanswered. In: Kölnische Rundschau , November 22, 2012.
3. ↑ Prime Minister Jürgen Rüttgers awards the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia to eighteen citizens ( Memento of October 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )