Fritz Grass

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Friedrich ( Fritz ) Wilhelm Bartholomäus Grass (born May 14, 1891 in Eupen , † February 28, 1956 in Köppern , Hessen ) was a German politician ( German Center Party ). Among other things, he was a member of the parliament and parliamentary group leader of his party in the Prussian state parliament .

Live and act

Grass came from Rölsdorf near Düren. After attending school, he studied at the University of Bonn , where he in 1920 with a thesis on the Aachen aldermen chair to Dr. phil. received his doctorate.

From 1914 to 1918 Grass took part in the First World War. After retiring from the military in 1919, he became head of department at the Kurhessischer Bauernverein in Fulda . A year later, in 1920, he assumed the post of General Secretary of that body. In 1922 he finally rose to become the director of the overall organization of the Mittelrheinisch-Nassau farmers' association in Koblenz . In 1928 he also took over the post of a committee member of the Prussian State Bank .

Grass was politically active in the Catholic Center Party from around 1920: from 1921 to 1924 he was a member of the Provincial Parliament of the Hesse-Nassau Province . In December 1924 he was elected to the Prussian state parliament, to which he belonged - after confirming his mandate in the state elections of 1932 and 1933 - until the dissolution of this body by the National Socialists in 1933. From around 1931 he held the post of parliamentary group manager within the center's parliamentary group. According to Edmund Forschbach , Grass was originally a staunch atheist and supporter of the teachings of Ernst Haeckel , but had come to the Center Party as an opportunist through his work in the Kurhessischer Bauernverein ("He said to me with a slightly malicious smile:" If I am clerical I have to go to church too. »“). In a similar way, Heinrich Brüning described Grass in his memoirs as a “careerist” and as a “instinctlessly willing negotiator with Nazi representatives”.

In August 1932, after the failed negotiations between Reich President Hindenburg and Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen and Adolf Hitler about the possibility of Hitler and some other National Socialists joining the Papen government (which at that time existed in the form of a presidential cabinet not legitimized by parliament ), as a representative of the center took the initiative to hold talks with the National Socialists to form a government for both parties in Prussia, by far the largest and most important federal state in the German Reich. The background to this was that the Center and the NSDAP had held a majority of the state parliament mandates since the April 1932 elections. Hitler took up Grass' initiative and authorized his follower Hanns Kerrl , who was then President of the Prussian state parliament, to enter into negotiations with the Prussian parliamentary group of the center. In the subsequent negotiations, in which, in addition to Kerrl and Grass, Gregor Strasser and Hermann Göring for the NSDAP and Eugen Bolz and Thomas Esser for the center took part, the National Socialists claimed the post of Prussian Prime Minister, but offered the center half that Cabinet seats, Grass was also guaranteed a ministerial post. The negotiations ultimately failed, but helped to give the National Socialists a boost in the crisis year of 1932 and to put the Reich government under pressure.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Grass offered Hermann Göring, who was now the Prussian Minister of the Interior, to cooperate with the center, if the Nazi government waived it, as part of the "cleaning up" of the civil servants' apparatus it had begun to remove from civil service. In June 1933, according to Heinrich Brüning , Grass urged the dissolution of the Center Party in order to quickly join the NSDAP.

Fonts

  • The Aachen jury chair. A contribution to the constitutional history of the free imperial city of Aachen , dissertation Bonn 1920.

literature

  • Herbert Hömig : Brüning - politicians without a mandate: Between Weimar and Bonn Republic , 2005, p.
  • Kurt Pätzold , Manfred Weissbecker: History of the NSDAP 1920-1945 , Cologne 2009, p.?.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Death register of the Köppern registry office No. 80/1956.
  2. ^ Edmund Forschbach: Edgar Jung. A Conservative Revolutionary , 1984, p. 47.
personal data
SURNAME Grass, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grass, Friedrich Wilhelm Bartholomäus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (center)
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Eupen
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1956
Place of death Köppern , Hessen