Georg-August Zinn

Georg-August Zinn (center) at the reception of the Lower Saxony State Representation

Georg-August Zinn (born May 27, 1901 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 27, 1976 there ) was a German lawyer and politician ( SPD ). From 1950 to 1969 he was Prime Minister of Hesse .

Youth and education

Georg-August Zinn was born on May 27, 1901 as the second child of the chief engineer Konrad Zinn and his wife Marie Zinn. Born in Hinterthür in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen . In addition to an older sister, he had two younger brothers. Due to the father's frequent career changes, the family was forced to change residence several times.

Zinn attended the Holbeinschule and the Sachsenhausen Gymnasium in Frankfurt am Main, the Oberrealschule in Bielefeld and the Oberrealschule in front of the Holsten Gate in Hamburg . After a short time as a soldier on the Western Front in 1918, he passed the Abitur at Oberrealschule I in Kassel in March 1920 .

Georg-August Zinn came into contact with the worries and needs of the workers and their families at an early age, so that despite the fact that he came from a family home that was closer to the center, he felt that he belonged to the Social Democrats. Before graduating from high school, he joined the SPD in 1919.

Only shortly after graduating from high school, his father died in May 1920, so that the family was left with almost no support. The original idea of ​​going to university had to be abandoned because, as the eldest son, he had to ensure the family's food. The tutoring sessions for technical employees of the Henschel & Sohn company, which Zinn had already carried out for some time, were not enough, so that he decided to start training as a local civil servant at the city administration in Kassel. After completing his apprenticeship, Zinn worked as a municipal civil servant in the higher service for the city of Kassel.

From 1923 he took leave of absence without pay and studied law and political science in Göttingen and Berlin , which he completed in 1927 with the first state examination and in 1931 with the second state examination. He then left the Kassel city administration and settled in Kassel as a lawyer.

Politics in the Weimar Republic

Even at this time Georg-August Zinn was politically active for the Social Democrats. In Göttingen he joined a socialist student movement, in Berlin he was also chairman of the local socialist student movement. In 1925 he was elected to the management of the Kurhessisches Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold in Kassel. In November 1929 Zinn was elected as the youngest member of the Kassel city parliament for the SPD.

There he became one of the fiercest opponents of Roland Freisler , who later became President of the People's Court . In a sharp argument in the city parliament, in which Freisler raged in his own way, Zinn ordered an ambulance and straitjackets to have a madman picked up.

Work and Resistance in the Time of National Socialism

After the National Socialists came to power , attacks against the democratic parties increased steadily. Nevertheless, in the local elections on March 16, 1933, Zinn was re-elected as one of 16 Social Democrats in the Kassel city parliament. He was forbidden from exercising his mandate in June by order of the Kassel police chief.

Zinn and other upright democrats tried to oppose the National Socialists. After the occupation of the social democratic "Kasseler Volksblatt" by the National Socialists , pistols from the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a democratic alliance founded to protect the republic during the Weimar period, were still stored in the publishing house. Since the weapons were not supposed to fall to the National Socialists, Zinn and his friend Willi Goethe disguised themselves as construction workers and managed to remove the weapons from the building in wheelbarrows under old cement sacks and sink them in the Fulda.

As a lawyer, Georg-August Zinn continued to campaign against the Nazi regime. Among other things, he defended the Kassel district secretary of the SPD and later parliamentary group leader of the SPD Hesse, Rudolf Freidhof , who was charged with "atrocity propaganda" because he had pointed out the abuse of the SA . Zinn and his brother Fritz photographed the citizens who were in hospitals and abused by the SA in their beds and presented the photos to the public prosecutor, so that the proceedings against Freidhof were discontinued.

In July 1933, Zinn and a group of leading social democrats were accused of being one of the "former friends of Philipp Scheidemann ", the former SPD Chancellor and Lord Mayor of Kassel, in "protective custody".

After his release, he was raided and his lawyer was banned from appearing as a lawyer in political trials. Although this led to a decrease in the number of his clients, it did not prevent Zinn from continuing to work as a lawyer for Jews and "Gypsies".

An interim injunction against the then Nazi propaganda leader and later Gauleiter Karl Gerland , obtained by Zinn on behalf of the former Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun (SPD) before the regional court, also caused a stir .

After the arrest and reprisals by the National Socialists, Zinn's mother had also been arrested in the meantime, Zinn became more cautious, but kept in contact with the Red Shock Troop resistance group , whose management staff also included his younger brother Karl . After his brother was arrested and sentenced by the People's Court to seven years' imprisonment, Georg-August Zinn managed to maintain close contact with his imprisoned brother Karl. He was able to smuggle cash receipts in and out of the prison several times. Karl Zinn was released from prison in January 1939. Zinn remained under the surveillance of the Gestapo and was regularly reprimanded during this time. He died in 1943 in Berlin while cleaning up from a bomb.

military service

In 1940 Zinn was drafted into the Wehrmacht , first for nine-month pre-military training in a military team, which was conducted under the direction of the SA. In the 21st century, this training was discussed posthumously in newspaper reports and at a conference on the preliminary study of the Nazi past of Hessian state parliament members as a possible burden for Zinn through involvement in Nazi organizations. At a historians' conference, the historian Hans-Peter Klausch did not classify the facts as a factor that would burden the former Prime Minister. At that time, according to Klausch, “hundreds of thousands had completed this pre-military training”.

Then Zinn came to a replacement battalion, which was first stationed in France. In the military he worked again as a lawyer and defended a. a. also French workers accused of sabotage.

Zinn was still under the surveillance of the Gestapo . When he realized he was about to be arrested, he was transferred to the Eastern Front with the help of a friend. There he continued to work as a defense attorney in court martial trials; u. a. He repeatedly successfully defended comrades who were accused of self-mutilation and therefore faced the death penalty .

During his time in Russia he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class . His superiors tried several times to send him to officer training courses in Germany, but Zinn refused, always aware of the associated examination by the Gestapo.

Conspiratorial connections to Adolf Reichwein and Ernst von Harnack and thus to the coup attempt of July 20, 1944 , remained undiscovered. When he was supposed to be arrested by the Gestapo after July 20, 1944, he only escaped because his regimental commander said that tin must have fallen.

In May 1945, Zinn and his unit in Austria were taken prisoner by the Americans.

Post-war period from 1945 to 1950

In June 1945 Zinn was released from captivity . Since he was one of the few unencumbered lawyers, the Americans made him district court director in Kassel.

On October 28, 1945, Zinn became the first Hessian Minister of Justice in the Geiler cabinet . He also remained Minister of Justice in the subsequent government of Prime Minister Christian Stock .

In 1946, together with Erwin Stein , Zinn was one of the fathers of the new Hessian constitution , which was adopted by an overwhelming majority in a referendum on December 1, 1946 as the first constitution of all western federal states .

In 1947, Zinn was sent to the bizonal economic council in his capacity as a member of the Hessian state parliament , where he was also deputy president of the committee and chairman of the legal committee. However, since the Americans pushed for a separation between parliamentary mandate and ministerial office, Zinn opted for the ministerial office.

Zinn was sent to the Parliamentary Council in Bonn on behalf of the state of Hesse in August 1948 . Zinn was chairman of the Constitutional Court and the Administration of Justice as well as deputy chairman of the committee for questions of principle and fundamental rights . Together with Heinrich von Brentano ( CDU ) and Thomas Dehler ( FDP ) he formed the editorial committee. This had the task of working out a coherent overall draft of the Basic Law . So he belonged to his fathers.

On August 14, 1949, Zinn ran for the first German Bundestag. He won the direct mandate in his constituency . He then resigned from his position as Hessian Minister of Justice. Zinn was a member of the German Bundestag from its first election in 1949 until January 21, 1951, and represented the constituency of Kassel . During this time he was also chairman of the Bundestag committee for the protection of the constitution. He was again a member of the German Bundestag from the 1961 federal election until December 13, 1961.

Prime Minister from 1950 to 1969

On December 14, 1950, Zinn was elected by the Hessian state parliament as the youngest Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. In addition, from January 10, 1951 to January 30, 1963, he again held the office of Hessian Minister of Justice. As from 1946 to 1949, he was also director of the Hessian state personnel office from January 10, 1951 to January 30, 1963. The most urgent task of the new government was on the one hand the reconstruction of the heavily destroyed state of Hesse and on the other hand the integration of almost a million war displaced persons . Due to the severe destruction of cities such as B. Kassel or Frankfurt am Main (in Hesse 18% of the apartments were destroyed) the displaced were mainly settled in rural regions. In order to be able to give work to the refugees in the structurally weak regions, the settlement of industrial companies and the start-ups of refugee companies were increasingly promoted.

As a result of the consistent expansion of the infrastructure and the promotion of industry, not only the integration of the refugees was possible under tin, but also the creation of countless jobs. This created 14,000 refugee companies with almost 90,000 permanent jobs. This is how Hessen gradually became an attractive business location. In particular, the chemical, automobile (e.g. VW plant in Baunatal ) and electrical industries became important employers in Hesse. The expansion of Frankfurt Airport into a major international airport also went back to the personal initiative of Zinn, of whom he was a long-time member of the Supervisory Board from 1947 to 1955 and Chairman from 1955 to 1971.

In 1956, Zinn appointed the social democrat Fritz Bauer as the Hessian attorney general , thus establishing a new era in coming to terms with the crimes of the National Socialist era . Fritz Bauer was a Jew and Social Democrat and therefore had to emigrate. As a public prosecutor in Braunschweig, he made a name for himself as a consistent educator of the crimes of the Nazi era. In addition to a large number of trials against Nazi criminals, among others, Bauer was involved. a. to the so-called Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt, in which for the first time a systematic attempt was made to clear up the crimes committed in the Auschwitz concentration camp and to punish the perpetrators. In the post-war period, which was not unproblematic, Zinn provided Bauer with the necessary political backing for the at that time perceived as very uncomfortable and not wanted by everyone to clarify the horrors of the Nazi era. Both men were linked by a close relationship of trust, which u. a. it showed that Bauer was the only one to inaugurate Zinn when he learned about Adolf Eichmann's whereabouts . Both men decided not to notify the German authorities, but rather to inform the Israeli authorities of Eichmann's whereabouts. This then led to Eichmann's arrest and trial in Israel .

After Zinn suffered a life-threatening stroke in the spring of 1969, he announced his resignation as prime minister on August 27, 1969 and ended his political career.

family

Zinn was married twice, most recently to Dr. Christa Zinn (1927-2002). His living sons are the economics professor Karl Georg Zinn , the doctor Georg-Christian Zinn and the lawyer Philip-André Zinn.

Georg-August Zinn's tomb in the north cemetery in Wiesbaden

Georg-August Zinn was buried in the north cemetery in Wiesbaden .

Political party

Zinn had been a member of the SPD since 1919. At the time of the Weimar Republic he joined the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold . From 1947 to 1969 he was state chairman of the SPD Hessen . From 1952 to 1970 Zinn was on the party executive of the SPD. After Kurt Schumacher's death , Zinn was traded as the future party chairman and candidate for chancellor . During the Bundestag election campaign in 1961 , he was part of the government team that Willy Brandt presented on November 25, 1960 at the SPD federal party conference in Hanover . Zinn was earmarked for the case of the election victory as Federal Minister of Justice . In 1967 he was traded as the successor to Heinrich Lübke for the office of the Federal President.

Public offices

From December 1, 1946 to October 31, 1949, Zinn was the Hessian Minister of Justice in the Geiler and Stock cabinets . On December 14, 1950 he was elected Prime Minister of Hesse. He held this office until October 3, 1969, making him the Hessian Prime Minister with the longest term of office to this day. From 1950 to 1963 he held in personal union , the office of the Hessian Minister of Justice, which he already held previously. As Prime Minister, Zinn pardoned the “euthanasia” murderer Bodo Gorgaß in January 1958 , who was thus able to leave prison after almost eleven years in prison. He had originally been sentenced to death in 1947 because at least 1,000 cases of homicides committed in the Hadamar killing center could be proven.

From September 7, 1953 to September 6, 1954 and from November 1, 1964 to October 31, 1965, Zinn was President of the Federal Council on a rotating basis . From 23 June 1955 to 1969 was the tin from the Federal certain co-chairman of the mediation committee of the Bundestag and Bundesrat.

The establishment of the Hessian State Center for Homeland Service (today: Hessian State Center for Political Education ) in 1953 was suggested by him. In 1961, Zinn also initiated the Hessentag , an annual festival of the State of Hesse at different locations.

Honors

Memorial plaque on the Paulskirche in Frankfurt

Georg-August Zinn was awarded the Grand Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953 . In 1971 he received the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal of the State of Hesse. He was an honorary citizen of the cities of Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden and Kassel. After his death, various schools and streets were named after him. Among other things, the State Chancellery of the Hessian Prime Minister is located in Wiesbaden on Georg-August-Zinn-Strasse. The local elementary school in Morschen is named after Georg-August Zinn. In honor of Zinn, the Hessian SPD has been awarding the Georg August Zinn Prize on a regular basis since 2002 .

Publications

• Zinn, Georg-August, Theodor Eschenburg , Theodor Heuss : Festgabe for Carlo Schmid for his 65th birthday , Mohr (Siebeck), Tübingen 1962.
• Together with Erwin Stein: The Constitution of the State of Hesse. Comment. ( Zinn / Stein ), Gehlen, Bad Homburg vd H. 1954.

literature

• Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Hrsg.): Our task is called Hessen - Georg-August Zinn - Prime Minister 1950–1969. Wiesbaden 2001.

Web links

Commons : Georg-August Zinn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Georg-August Zinn in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Jörg A. Huber: City history of Kassel. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86568-377-9 , p. 315.
2. ^ Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar : The National Socialist seizure of power in 1933 in the city of Kassel. In: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Arbeit, Leben Kassel (ed.): Kassel and North Hesse in the time of National Socialism. Documentation of a series of lectures. Kassel 2003, pp. 7-18.
3. ^ R. Knigge-Tesche: Persecution and Resistance in Hesse 1933-1945. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 583.
4. ↑ ^{a b} SPD city council group in Kassel (ed.): 100 years of the SPD parliamentary group in the Kassel town hall. ( Memento of December 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) February 2010, p. 17.
5. ↑ Scheidemann case 1933. List of documents.
6. ↑ Ulrike Scherb: "High treason" for resistance. ( Memento from February 23, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )
7. ^ R. Küstermeier: The Red Shock Troop (= contributions to the resistance. 3). German Resistance Memorial Center, 2001 ( gdw-berlin.de ( Memento of the original from March 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. PDF). 
8. ↑ Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop. An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism (= writings of the German Resistance Memorial Center , analyzes and representations. Volume 11). Lukas, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86732-274-4 , p. 529.
9. ↑ ^{a b} Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop. An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism . 1st edition. Lukas Verlag for Art and Intellectual History, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86732-274-4 .
10. ^ SA armed forces. from: geschichte.wikia.com , accessed February 12, 2014.
11. ↑ Thomas Holl: Hessischer Landtag: Temporarily a third of the deputies are former NSDAP members. In: FAZ . February 19, 2013. Retrieved February 19, 2013.
12. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau . 20th February 2013.
13. ^ This took place in the state parliament of Wiesbaden on March 14th and 15th, 2013
14. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau. March 14, 2013.
15. ^ Zinn, Georg August. on: wiesbaden.de , accessed on April 13, 2014.
16. ↑ G. Laste: The economic situation and development of the settlement areas established in Hesse from 1945 to 1953. Dissertation . Giessen 1957.
17. ↑ A. Hedwig: Georg August Zinn Prime Minister 1950–1969. In: Catalog of the Hessian Main State Archives for the exhibition. Wiesbaden 2001, pp. 49-50, p. 98.
18. ^ I. Wojak: Auschwitz Trial 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt am Main. Snoek / Fritz Bauer Institute, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-936859-08-6 , pp. 53-54.
19. ^ F. Backhaus et al .: Fritz Bauer the public prosecutor. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-593-50105-5 , pp. 206-207.
20. ↑ I. Harel: The house on Garibaldistraße. In: Der Spiegel . Volume 29, No. 28, 1975, pp. 92-100.
21. ^ Prime Minister Zinn announces his resignation, August 27, 1969. Contemporary history in Hesse. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
22. ↑ bundestag.de: Report of the meeting of November 6, 1964 (PDF).