Gerhard Frey (politician)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gerhard Frey (2009)

Gerhard Michael Frey (born February 18, 1933 in Cham in the Upper Palatinate ; † February 19, 2013 in Graefelfing ) was a German right-wing extremist politician , journalist and publisher with extensive real estate property across Germany. From 1971 to 2009 he was federal chairman of the right-wing extremist German People's Union (DVU), which he founded, initially as an association and from 1987 as a party.

Family and youth

Gerhard Frey came from a wealthy merchant family in the Upper Palatinate , in which a conservative attitude prevailed. His father Adalbert Frey (1889-1944) was a member of the Bavarian People's Party and from 1919 to 1929 city councilor in Cham , in both World Wars a soldier (most recently a captain) and in 1919 was a member of the Bayerwald battalion , one of the free corps that was ordered by the social democratic government Hoffmann were used against the Munich Soviet Republic .

Gerhard Frey had an older brother, Adalbert jr. , a PhD in economics who owned the family department stores and who died in 2006.

He was married to Regine Frey; the marriage resulted in four children. One daughter is a lawyer, one son is a lawyer. Frey lived in Graefelfing near Munich .

Professional background

Frey first attended the secondary school in his home town of Cham, then from November 21, 1945 to October 23, 1946, the Ettal Benedictine grammar school . After graduating from high school in Cham, he studied law and political science. He completed his two years of legal clerkship with the government of Upper Bavaria . This was followed by a two-year traineeship at the Passauer Neue Presse .

On July 12, 1960, the Karl Franzens University Graz awarded Frey the degree of Dr. rer. pole. The subject of his " Inaugural dissertation for obtaining a doctorate in law and political science" was: The trade links between Austria and Germany . Frey's promoter was the constitutional law teacher Erwin Melichar , who was President of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Austria from 1977 to 1983.

Frey inherited half of the family department store chain. In addition to his publishing houses and newspapers, he owned a number of tenement houses in Munich- Pasing and Berlin .

Press organs

From 1951 Frey worked as a freelancer for the German Soldiers' Newspaper , which was founded that year by former Wehrmacht officers with American support to promote the idea of ​​a defense contribution by the Federal Republic. The organ took an anti-Soviet course and a nationalist line. From 1954 the US government and the Federal Press and Information Office dried up. In 1958 Frey founded the Druckschriften- und Zeitungsverlags GmbH (DSZ-Verlag) and managed to get half of the German soldiers' newspaper , later renamed the German national newspaper , into his possession. In 1959 he became the publisher and editor-in-chief of this newspaper. From 1960 the sheet belonged to him completely.

Frey tried to make the National-Zeitung the central organ of right-wing extremist parties and associations nationwide . Topics and forms of representation ranged from propaganda against further immigration to revisionist interpretations of history to anti-Semitism and - during the debate on this - statements against the erection of the Holocaust memorial . In doing so, the paper repeatedly succeeded in attracting prominent employees, for example the psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck , who had to flee from Hitler and published numerous articles in the National-Zeitung , or Moshe Menuhin, who died in 1983, and his grandson Gerard Menuhin , who under the Title Menuhin and how he sees the world published a column. In addition, there was an interview with Noam Chomsky in 2002 , the authenticity of which is doubtful.

Frey was able to acquire extensive real estate holdings nationwide. In later years he bought the German weekly newspaper . The Freiheitliche Buch- und Zeitschriftenverlags GmbH ( FZ-Verlag ) is affiliated with the DSZ-Verlag . The managing director of FZ-Verlag is his wife Regine Frey, who now runs the entire DSZ-Verlag. Frey's daughter Michaela, a lawyer, also works in the publishing house management. His son also represented his party and his publishing house as a lawyer in court.

Political career

In 1962 the All-German Party (GDP) proposed Frey to be on their list for the Bavarian state election on November 25, 1962. As the National-Zeitung reported on June 1, 1962, Frey turned down the "honorable offer" because the structure of the newspaper required his strength. For the 1969 Bundestag election , Frey tried in vain to be a candidate for the NPD . In the same year, the Federal Minister of the Interior at the time, Ernst Benda, applied to the Federal Constitutional Court that Frey had forfeited the basic right to freedom of the press because of abuse under Article 18 of the Basic Law . The application was finally rejected by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1974. In 1971 he founded the German People's Union (DVU), an association that he had designed as a basin for disappointed former NPD members and whose activities were primarily directed against Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. In 1975 Frey became a member of the NPD and tried in vain to be elected Deputy Federal Chairman; However, he became an assessor in the federal board. However, he gave up this office a year later. The party's co-founder and former federal chairman Adolf von Thadden resigned from the party out of annoyance at Frey's election to the federal executive committee. 1979 Frey also turned his back on the NPD. In 1987 he founded the DVU as a party under the name of German People's Union - List D .

The newly founded party entered into alliances with the NPD until the early 1990s, which were renewed in the so-called Germany Pact from 2004 onwards. In between, the relationship between the two parties was very tense. Frey financed "his" party to a not inconsiderable part from his private assets, which enabled him to lead an authoritarian style . The DVU succeeded in entering state parliaments several times, but many DVU state parliament members turned their backs on the party because of the leadership style, and reports are often even heard of remote control by the federal party. That is why the DVU was often referred to as the “Frey party”, sometimes also as a “phantom” or “virtual party”. The party was seen by many as a power and economic instrument of Frey, since there was no clear separation between the publisher, newspaper and party. The number of members of the party has steadily declined since the turn of the millennium.

At the federal party conference in January 2009, Frey did not run again for the office of federal chairman. He remained editor of the National-Zeitung. In October 2010, he donated an amount of over one million euros to the party he once headed by waiving the repayment of a loan he had granted. Frey did not make a statement on this. Possibly he wanted to pave the way for the merger with the NPD, since the DVU's debts had been an obstacle.

contacts

In his weekly political organ, he repeatedly confessed the good friendship that he had with Reinhard Gehlen , the head of the foreign armies department in the Third Reich , who later became the first head of the West German Federal Intelligence Service . Gehlen was in the American zone of occupation southern Germany by the Americans US during the Cold War, adopted for its own purposes and installed in the BND.

Frey maintained further contacts with the British Holocaust denier David Irving , Vyacheslav Daschitschew , the Vlaams Belang , Jean-Marie Le Pen and the far-right Russian politician Vladimir Wolfowitsch Schirinowski . Frey was also closely connected to the CSU politicians Alfred Seidl (former Bavarian Minister of the Interior) and Theodor Maunz (law professor and Basic Law commentator), although the latter only became known after his death.

In 1976, the military sports group Hoffmann occasionally provided files for DVU events. In the following year Frey paid Karl-Heinz Hoffmann a fine of 7920 DM. The National-Zeitung wrote about a “bizarre hobby of the military sports director” and his “masquerades”.

External perception

Frey was considered a public shy. However, he himself rejected this claim:

“The fact that countless interviews with me, because they did not fit into the concept of my opponents, were not published, is just as little to blame as the fact that it is not uncommon for only a half sentence or a few words to be used. Objective voices are surprised that even after hours of discussion about DVU election successes, all possible opponents can express themselves, but not me. So it is true that year after year I have zero opportunities to express my views on television, which is difficult to twist into that I would shy away from making my views known. "

Frey was controversial within the right-wing scene because of his commercial calculations. In the past, numerous right-wing activists repeatedly accused him of being more interested in money than in politics. In contrast, the former REP chairman, Franz Schönhuber, described the National-Zeitung as Frey's “hobby horse”. He also never found out why Frey had donated millions of marks for the party. In fact, the party's annual report, published as Bundestag printed matter, does not suggest that the inherently wealthy Frey was doing business with politics.

literature

Web links

Commons : Gerhard Frey  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Gerhard Frey  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ DVU founder Gerhard Frey dies abendzeitung-muenchen.de (accessed on February 23, 2013)
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Proissl: A little hatred of the people. In: Die Zeit , 1998.
  3. ↑ Annual reports 1945–1946 , Benediktinergymnasium Ettal 1905–2005 and the student index in the grammar school's archive.
  4. ↑ Gerhard Frey: The trade ties between Austria and Germany . Graz, state science Dissertation July 12, 1960. Munich 1960 (registered in the Austrian National Library).
  5. ↑ Vera Gaserow : Living Frey House. In: Die Zeit , September 17, 1998.
  6. ^ Alfred Schobert : "Nothing to worry about"? In: Grassroots Revolution .
  7. ↑ Renate Schostack : The office of the phantom . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 29, 1998, No. 99, p. 45.
  8. ↑ Martin Reyher: A € 1 million donation paves the way for the party merger of DVU and NPD. ( Memento of the original from November 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: parliamentwatch.de , October 28, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / blog.abektivenwatch.de
  9. ^ Rainer Fromm : The "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann": Presentation, analysis and classification. Diss., Verlag Peter Lang, 1998, p. 120 f.
personal data
SURNAME Frey, Gerhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frey, Gerhard Michael (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DVU) and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Cham
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2013
Place of death Graefelfing