Hans-Christoph Seebohm

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Election poster (1961)

Hans-Christoph Seebohm (born August 4, 1903 in Emanuelssegen, Pleß district , Upper Silesia , † September 17, 1967 in Bonn ) was a German politician ( DP and CDU ). He was Federal Minister of Transport from 1949 to 1966 , most recently also Vice Chancellor for a few weeks . To date, he has the longest uninterrupted term of office as Federal Minister.

education and profession

Seebohm was a son of the coal and steel industrialist Kurt Seebohm (1870–1946) and his wife Ida Seebohm, nee. Seebohm (1869-1958).

After graduating from the König-Georg-Gymnasium in Dresden in 1921 , he studied mining and engineering in Freiburg , Munich and Berlin-Charlottenburg , which he completed in 1928 as a graduate mining engineer. Since 1923 he was a corps bow wearer of the Hasso-Borussia Freiburg . From 1928 to 1931, the year in which he passed the Bergassessorexamen , he worked as a mountain trainee at the Oberbergamt in Halle an der Saale . In 1932 he received his doctorate as Dr.-Ing. with the work Tectonic Investigations in the mountainous region between Hanover, Pyrmont and Minden at the Technical University of Berlin . After 1933 he held managerial positions in various mining, oil and mechanical engineering companies. Until 1938 he was works manager of the Sosnitza mine and the Preußengrube in Miechowitz / Mechtal and in 1939 mine director of Hohenlohe-Werke AG. He was then chairman of the supervisory board of Britannia-Kohlenwerke AG in Königswerth and of the Egerländer Bergbau AG, co-founded by Seebohm in 1941, which was founded as a "rescue company" specifically to take over " aryanized " property and was owned by the Reich until it was sold. He was also Vice President of the Braunschweig Chamber of Commerce and Industry . How close Seebohm was to the Nazi regime has not yet been clarified.

From 1945 to 1949 he was managing director of the Deilmann AG oil company in Dortmund . During this time he was also chairman of the oil production and mechanical engineering trade associations in the British zone of occupation . From 1947 to 1963 he was President of the Braunschweig Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Since 1950 Seebohm, who was not a Sudeten German himself , was a member of the board of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft . This membership was due to the fact that his parents had lived in Falkenau in northwest Bohemia for a long time . From 1959 until his death he was the spokesman for the Landsmannschaft and one of the most active lobbyists for the associations of expellees in Bonn, which was also evident in connection with the naming of motorway rest areas on his initiative. Since 1959, Seebohm regularly made headlines through his much-criticized “Sunday speeches”, which resulted in numerous arguments with Adenauer in the federal cabinet. Seebohm was considered a right-wing, revisionist hardliner with regard to the German loss of territory as a result of the Second World War. In his “Kassel Speech”, for example, Seebohm negated the limits of the Treaty of Versailles and, as a representative of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, emphasized the right of Sudeten Germans to their homeland, which is now outside German borders. In May 1964, under pressure from the federal government, he had to publicly refrain from making statements on the legal status of the Sudetenland.

Political party

After the end of the war, Seebohm became a member of the “Lower Saxony State Party”, which in 1947 was renamed the German Party . He was one of the few displaced people in this party. From 1947 to 1955 he was Deputy Federal Chairman of the DP. Seebohm took part in the negotiations of the DP with the German Conservative Party - German Right Party and the Hessian National Democratic Party on July 1, 1949 about a joint election for the 1949 Bundestag election for his party together with Adolf Dedekind , Carl Lauenstein , Walter von Lüde , Hans-Joachim von Merkatz , Ernst-August Runge , Heinrich Hellwege and Friedrich Wilke participated. Although the plans had progressed quite far, they ultimately failed because the British military government declared that a merging party would not be granted a license and would therefore not be able to run for election. A DP flyer of the time referred to the poetry of the right-wing extremist writer and Freikorpsführer Bogislav von Selchow : "Whether the shame of figs that took everything ..." From 1949 Seebohm expressed himself in speeches about reverence for flags of the Nazi era, spoke of the Allies enforced Basic Law and a social democracy with Asian roots, which could not lead to Germanism. Thomas Vogtherr praises him as one of those politicians who sought and achieved the integration of representatives of "extremely right-wing positions in the politics of the young Federal Republic of Germany". It contradicts the idea of ​​integration, however, that it - contrary to the spirit of the Basic Law - adopted extremist evaluations as its own.

Seebohm was elected party chairman at the federal party conference of the DP in Goslar in 1952, but did not accept the election. In the following years the distance to this party grew, which was finally reflected in the fact that Seebohm left the DP on July 1, 1960 and became a member of the CDU on September 20, 1960 . In 1964 he was elected chairman of the CDU regional association in Hanover and in 1967 the CDU's federal treasurer.

MP

Hans-Christoph Seebohm in a group photo of the Federal Cabinet (third row on the right, 1963)

From 1946 to 1951 he was a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament . In 1948 and 1949 he was a member of the Parliamentary Council and chairman of the DP group. From 1949 until his death he was a member of the German Bundestag .

During deliberations on the Basic Law in the Parliamentary Council on December 6, 1948, he surprisingly proposed a ban on the death penalty. His party wanted to denounce further Allied death sentences for Nazi war criminals in order to recruit former National Socialists and to increase the pressure to end the Allied denazification . However, his application was rejected on January 18, 1949 in the main committee of the Parliamentary Council with 9 to 6 votes. When the deputy Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner again submitted the abolition of the death penalty as a motion to the main committee on February 10, 1949, he succeeded in organizing a majority that was also confirmed in the plenary of the Parliamentary Council and in Article 102 of the Basic Law “The death penalty is abolished. ”ended. On July 1, 1960, he left the DP parliamentary group and, after a short time as a non-attached member , became a member of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group on September 20, 1960 .

Hans-Christoph Seebohm moved in the general election in 1949 on the national list of Lower Saxony , in the general election in 1957 over the national list of Hamburg and otherwise always as directly selected delegates of the constituency Harburg-Soltau in the Bundestag one.

Public offices

From 1946 to 1948 he was Minister of Lower Saxony for Development, Labor and Health Care in the state government led by Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf . After the federal election in 1949, he was appointed Federal Minister of Transport on September 20, 1949 in the federal government headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer . He also exercised this office under Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard , where he last held the office of Vice Chancellor for three weeks . Seebohm then no longer belonged to the cabinet of the grand coalition and therefore left the federal government on November 30, 1966.

On Seebohm's initiative, the Federal Motor Transport Authority was founded in 1951 as a central collection point for notifications about motor vehicles and their drivers, and the Federal Aviation Authority as an investigation center in aviation. In the mid-1950s, the so-called " Seebohm's Laws " drastically restricted the dimensions and weights of trucks in order to make the Deutsche Bundesbahn more competitive again. In the course of European harmonization, this solo effort soon had to be given up again.

He was a member of the federal government for 17 years and is surpassed by only a few politicians, who, however, have exercised their terms of office with interruptions. However, Seebohm is the federal minister with the longest uninterrupted term in office.

Just a few months after leaving office, Seebohm died of a pulmonary embolism in Bonn. His urn was buried in Bad Pyrmont in the cemetery on Lortzingstrasse.

Honors and criticism

In 1950 the Allied High Commissioner lodged a complaint with Adenauer for denying Germany's surrender. In 1953 Seebohm received the Nordgau Culture Prize from the city of Amberg in the “ Nordgau Funding” category.

Seebohm was an honorary member of the Prague university singers' Barden in Munich (1954) and an honorary citizen of Braunschweig (1954) as well as an honorary doctorate (1958) and honorary senator (1953) of the Technical University of Braunschweig . Posthumously in 1968 he was awarded the European Charlemagne Prize of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft . On May 17, 1963 he was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit.

In 2010, after an intense public debate about Seebohm's Nazi past, the Uelzen City Council decided to rename a street named after him.

family

He married Elisabeth Triebel (1907–1967) from Tilsit and had two children with her:

  • Thomas Mulvany , Dr. phil. (* July 7, 1934 - † August 25, 2014)
  • Irina, Dr. med.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Hans-Christoph Seebohm  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans-Christoph Seebohm, History of the CDU, Konrad Adenauer Foundation . In: Konrad Adenauer Foundation . ( kas.de [accessed October 26, 2017]).
  2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 31, 380.
  3. ^ A b Gilad, Margalit: Hans-Christoph Seebohm and his attempt to universalize the problem of expellees in the post-war period . In: Stickler, Matthias (ed.): Beyond set-off and displacement. New research on flight, displacement and displaced persons integration . Stuttgart 2014, p. 35 .
  4. ↑ digital-kulturanthropologie.de
  5. ↑ a b Peter Bruges: Right off to the fatherland . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1967 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Dr. des. Christian Packheiser: Working up the history of the Federal Ministry of Transport (BVM) and the Ministry of Transport (MfV) of the GDR with regard to continuities and transformations at the time of National Socialism . Ed .: Institute for Contemporary History. Munich August 2018, p. 110 .
  7. ↑ Seebohm, Hans-Christoph: 3 lectures: The right to the home, the Kasseler speech, transport policy problems in a European perspective . 1952.
  8. ^ Schmollinger: German Conservative Party - German Right Party . In: Stöss: Party handburch. Westdeutscher Verlag , Opladen 1986, p. 1002f.
  9. ↑ quoted by Rudolf Augstein in: Der Spiegel. 13/1960.
  10. ↑ Uelzen City Council Information Service, June 17, 2010.
  11. ↑ See The Parliamentary Council 1948–1949. Files and minutes. Volume 14, Main Committee, arr. v. Michael F. Feldkamp , vol. II, Munich 2009, pp. 1298–1304 and pp. 1618–1625 as well as The Parliamentary Council 1948–1949. Files and minutes. Volume 9, plenary, arr. v. Wolfram Werner, Munich 1996, pp. 478-484.
  12. ↑ Report on spiegel.de, accessed on November 14, 2012.
  13. ^ Erhard HM Lange: Trailblazer of the Federal Republic. Members of the Parliamentary Council. Nineteen historical biographies. Federal University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration, Brühl 1999, p. 237.
  14. ^ HJ Küsters: Documents on Germany Policy. 1998, p. 788.
  15. ↑ His boss - the Minister. In: The time . No. 45/1966.
  16. ^ Reports from research and university life 1957–1960 of the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig (editor Herbert Wilhelm, 1960)
personal data
SURNAME Seebohm, Hans-Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DP, CDU), Member of the Bundestag, Member of the Bundestag
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Emanuelssegen, Kr. Pless, Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH 17th September 1967
Place of death Bonn