Günther Gereke

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Günther Gereke (1932)

Günther Gereke (born October 6, 1893 in Gruna ; † May 1, 1970 in Neuenhagen near Berlin ) was a German lawyer and politician ( DNVP , CNBL , CDU , GB / BHE , DSP , Eastern CDU ).

Life

Weimar Republic

Gereke was born in the Gruna manor. He studied after the Abitur 1912 law and political science and economics at the Universities of Leipzig , Munich , Würzburg and Halle-Wittenberg . When the First World War broke out , he volunteered and was seriously wounded several times during the war. He passed the first state examination in law in 1915 at the Naumburg Higher Regional Court . After receiving both a doctorate in law and a Dr. rer. pole. After receiving his doctorate , he passed the Great State Examination in Berlin in 1918 . He then embarked on an administrative career.

Gereke in Hitler's cabinet ; on January 30, 1933 in the Reich Chancellery . 1st row seated, from left: Hermann Göring , Adolf Hitler , Franz von Papen ; 2nd row standing: Franz Seldte , Günther Gereke , Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk , Wilhelm Frick , Werner von Blomberg , Alfred Hugenberg

From 1919 Gereke was district administrator of the Torgau district ; In the same year he became a deputy for the DNVP in the County Council of the Province of Saxony . In 1921 he moved to the Hanover government, where he was a member of the government until 1923, "because of his national völkisch convictions" . He resigned from the service to manage the family estate in Pressel-Winkelmühle in the Dübener Heide . He founded the Prussian rural community group, which later became the all-German rural community group with his chairmanship (until 1933). The rural community network was a counterweight to the German Association of Cities under its chairman Konrad Adenauer . Furthermore, he was elected chairman of the regional federation and district chairman of the eastern regional federations of the province of Saxony and followed a call to the Agricultural University Berlin , where he read about state, administrative and cooperative law. He also worked in the Stahlhelm-Bund and in the Wehrwolf , for which he was elected Gau chairman in the Elbe-Estergau.

From May 1924 to 1928 he was a member of the Reichstag for the DNVP, which he left in 1929. He was then involved in the founding of the Christian National Peasant and Rural People's Party (CNBL), and he was elected vice chairman in the Reich. In addition, he became President of the German Land Community Assembly and authorized representative of the Reichsrat for the Province of Saxony as well as a deputy member of the Prussian State Council and member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council .

As deputy chairman, he represented the CNBL in the Reichstag from 1930 to 1932 . In 1932 he was chairman of the non-partisan committee in support of the election of Hindenburg as Reich President. He was also a member of the Provincial Parliament of the Prussian Province of Saxony . Under Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning he was State Commissioner for Public Works. He played a leading role in the plans for job creation programs that were taken up during the Nazi era. In Schleicher's cabinet , Gereke became Reich Commissioner for Employment and East Settlement Commissioner and retained this office until the beginning of 1933 after the change of government. He was a member of Hitler's first cabinet, even if only for a few weeks.

time of the nationalsocialism

Gereke was arrested by the Gestapo on March 23, 1933 for alleged embezzlement in office and taken to the prison on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. From there the Gestapo first transferred him to Moabit and then to the Tegel prison. On March 30, 1933, he was removed from his position as Reich Commissioner for Employment. He was accused of misappropriating donations in 1932 as chairman of the non-partisan committee that prepared the election of Hindenburg as Reich President. In a show trial on June 16, 1933, Gereke was sentenced by the Berlin Regional Court to two and a half years in prison for continued infidelity; Carl Langbehn was his defense attorney . The Reichsgericht overturned the judgment and referred it back to the lower court. Finally, on July 14, 1934, Gereke was sentenced by the Berlin Regional Court to two years and six months in prison and a fine of 100,000 Reichsmarks. The verdict was upheld by the Reichsgericht on January 24, 1935; he served his sentence until September 24, 1935.

On April 30, 1936, Gereke was arrested again by the Gestapo. With the beginning of the Second World War , he was under increased police surveillance. After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , he went into hiding and was later imprisoned for the third time by 1945.

post war period

After the end of the National Socialist dictatorship in 1945 he was appointed presidential director of the provincial government of Saxony-Anhalt and head of the interior department by the Soviet occupying power . In the summer of 1946 he moved to Celle in a British military vehicle in an officer's uniform and was initially accepted by his companion from the CNBL, the Celle CDU district chairman Wilhelm Brese in Marwede . There he joined the CDU and was later elected chairman of the CDU regional association in Hanover. In 1946/47 he was a member of the first state parliament of Lower Saxony , which was still appointed by the occupying power . On December 9, 1946, he was appointed Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister of Lower Saxony . On February 12, 1947 he was given leave of absence from this office and dismissed on April 11, 1947. From June 9, 1948 to June 21, 1950 he served as Lower Saxony's Minister of Agriculture .

As early as 1946, Adenauer had expressed concerns about Gereke's election because he was allegedly involved in an embezzlement affair in 1932, but he still defended him at a meeting of the CDU in the British zone. At the beginning of 1949 there were arguments and a rift between Adenauer and Gereke, because he publicly criticized the politics of the Union parties in the Parliamentary Council and called for a grand coalition after the federal elections. Gereke strictly rejected integration into the West as an obstacle to reunification and publicly referred to the federal government as a “split government”.

At the beginning of 1950 Gereke went to East Berlin without consulting political friends and conferred with Walter Ulbricht on the delivery of canned food in the “All-German Working Group for Agriculture and Forestry” . Adenauer intervened in June 1950 to persuade him to resign, as the CDU withdrew him from the ranks of ministers in the coalition. He initially remained non-attached , joined the BHE as a member of parliament on October 5, 1950 , but left the party again to forestall an expulsion. In November 1950 he founded the German Social Party (DSP). In the Lower Saxony state elections in 1951, the DSP won 0.8% and one seat, which he held until February 26, 1952 as a member of the faction of the Independent (FdU).

Under the covert mandate of the Federal Ministry for Pan-German Issues , the Volksbund for Peace and Freedom under its chairman Jürgen Hahn-Butry launched a campaign against Gereke with posters and leaflets in May 1951 : “Whoever chooses Gereke chooses Moscow” or “Ostagent Gereke”. In a leaflet from February / March 1951 the Volksbund claimed that Gereke had "made himself available to the Oberbolshevik Ulbricht for the Bolshevikization of the Federal Republic ". The leaflet ends with the appeal: " Beware of Günther Gereke! Do not fall for his fraud. Make sure that this dangerous Moscow agent is stopped! " Gereke defended himself with a lawsuit against Jürgen Hahn-Butry; Hahn-Butry was sentenced to three months in prison by the Hanover Regional Court on April 5, 1952 , but went on appeal. The Federal Cabinet , chaired by Federal Chancellor Adenauer, was interested in further developments and received reports, for example at the meeting on April 22, 1952. The process costs incurred by Hahn-Butry were reimbursed from the Federal Chancellor's secret budget, the so-called " Reptile Fund ". On August 2, 1954, the proceedings against Hahn-Butry were discontinued without a final judgment.

On July 26, 1952, Gereke moved to the GDR . He justified his transfer with irreconcilable differences to Bonn politics and a campaign of the Volksbund for peace and freedom, namely by Jürgen Hahn-Butry and Eberhard Taubert , who would not shy away from his physical destruction, said Gereke at a press conference of the GDR Information Office in East -Berlin. In the GDR he was active in propaganda against the Federal Republic and his adversary Adenauer. He became a member of the CDU block party and sat for them in the presidium of the National Council of the National Front of the GDR . He was chairman of the district committee of the National Front in the Frankfurt (Oder) district . In addition, from 1953 to 1969, as President of the Central Office for Breeding and Performance Tests of Thoroughbred and Trotter Horses in the GDR , he dedicated himself to horse breeding .

Fonts

See also

literature

  • The course against Adenauer . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1950, pp. 7-9 ( online - August 10, 1950 ).
  • From the recipe book . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1950, pp. 5 ( Online - Nov. 1, 1950 ).
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 . , Pp. 145-147.
  • Mathias Friedel: The People's League for Peace and Freedom (VFF). a partial study of West German anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War and its roots in National Socialism (= journalism in the Gardez! Vol. 3). Gardez! -Verlag, St. Augustin 2001, ISBN 3-89796-054-0 (Also: Mainz, University, Master's thesis, 1999).
  • Friedrich Winterhager: Günther Gereke - Lower Saxony's first interior minister - a wanderer between the political worlds. In: Yearbook of contemporary legal history. JJZG. Vol. 1, 1999/2000 (2000), ISSN  1869-6899 , pp. 356-368.
  • Friedrich Winterhager: Günther Gereke. A minister in the area of ​​tension during the Cold War. Biographical essay. Ludwigsfelder Verlags-Haus, Ludwigsfelde 2002, ISBN 978-3-933022-16-5 .
  • Short biography for:  Gereke, Günther . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Stephan A. Glienke: The Nazi past of a later member of the Lower Saxony state parliament. Final report on a project of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen on behalf of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Published by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Revised reprint of the first edition. Hanover 2012, p. 159 f. ( online (PDF; 870 kB)) .
  • Hans-Joachim Böttcher : Gereke, Friedrich Richard Gustav Karl Günther, in: Important historical personalities of the Düben Heath, AMF - No. 237, 2012, pp. 29–30.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So the entries in the handbooks of the Reichstag for the 2nd and 3rd electoral terms. This reason is missing in the biographical entry for the 5th electoral term.
  2. ↑ Federal Archives: Gereke, Günther
  3. ↑ History Pressel ( Memento of the original from October 28, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.laussig.de
  4. ^ With the German Lenin . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1950, pp. 5 ( Online - June 15, 1950 ).
  5. ↑ No. 680 Memorandum of the Ministerialrat Wienstein on the financing of the election campaign for the election of the Reich President of February 18, 1932 “Files of the Reich Chancellery. Weimar Republic"
  6. ^ Carl Langbehn: Protective letter in the criminal case against the district administrator a. D. Dr. Günther Gereke. Langbehn, Berlin 1933, DNB 361131062 .
  7. ^ Arnold Fratzscher: CDU in Lower Saxony. Democracy from the very beginning. Lower Saxony State Center for Political Education, Hanover 1971, p. 59.
  8. ↑ Barbara Simon : MPs in Lower Saxony 1946–1994. Biographical manual. Edited by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Lower Saxony State Parliament, Hanover 1996, p. 126.
  9. ↑ Friedel: The People's League for Peace and Freedom. 2001, pp. 130-138.
  10. ↑ Volksbund for Peace and Freedom eV, leaflet around February / March 1951, quoted in. after Friedrich Winterhager: Günther Gereke. A minister in the area of ​​tension during the Cold War. 2002, p. 73.
  11. ↑ Friedel: The People's League for Peace and Freedom. 2001, pp. 130-138.
personal data
SURNAME Gereke, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and politician (DNVP, CNBL, CDU, GB / BHE), MdR, MdL
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Gruna (LauWEIS)
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1970
Place of death Neuenhagen near Berlin