Hans Edgar Jahn

Candidate poster for the 1979 European elections

Hans Edgar Jahn (born November 21, 1914 in Neustettin , Pomerania ; † April 21, 2000 in Bonn ) was a German journalist , publicist , PR consultant , publisher and politician ( CDU ).

Life and work

Jahn was born the son of a master blacksmith and attended elementary school. In 1932 he joined the NSDAP. From 1933 to 1938 he did military service in the Reich and Kriegsmarine . In 1939 he passed the "Abitur" (Abitur) . At the same time he began studying history, geography, geopolitics, foreign trade and international law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1937 , which he had to interrupt when he was drafted into military service in 1939. Nevertheless, he was able to continue his studies at the end of the year, which he then completed with the examination for Dipl. Sc. Pol. completed. In 1943, Jahn's propaganda book Der Steppensturm - The Jewish-Bolshevik Imperialism was published , for which he came under fire in 1979 and resigned from his European mandate (→ parliamentary mandate ). From 1942 to 1945 he again took part in the Second World War as a soldier . Most recently he was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve. He was also a Nazi command officer . At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the British, from which he was released in 1947.

After his release from captivity, Jahn moved to West Germany as an expellee and worked there as a journalist and publicist. From 1951 to 1963 he acted as PR advisor to Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer . As such, Jahn was one of the founders of the Working Group on Democratic Circles (ADK), which was committed to "promoting civic education". He headed it from 1951 to 1957 and then chaired it until it was dissolved in 1969. The ADK was "officially an independent and non-partisan association, in reality a dubious CDU apron organization that soon spanned a network of 17,000 volunteers and 500 speakers across the republic."

Since 1954 Jahn was a member of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) in London . In 1956/57 he was one of the co-founders of the Study Society for Public Relations, of which he subsequently became executive chairman. He studied law and political science in 1958 at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz , where he in 1959 with the work of the Baghdad Pact and its economic integration issues to Dr. rer. pole. received his doctorate. From 1958 to 1970 he worked as a publisher and editor of the monthly magazines Politische Welt and Politische Informations . He was also the co-editor of the Defense Issues Paperback and the author of several books, including on civic education and the continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The black continent was particularly important to him: At a lecture in Nuremberg in 1962, he described the South African apartheid regime as a "model for all of Africa" ​​and declared: "In no other country are the Negroes doing so well".

Jahn was also a member of several foreign companies and various professional associations.

For a time he was Vice President of the Paneuropean Union Germany. He was also involved in organizations for expellees, was President of the Pomeranian Assembly of Representatives from 1962 to 1995, and was then Honorary President until his death. He had been a member of the presidium of the Federation of Expellees (BdV) since 1964 and its vice-president from 1967 to 1974. From 1967 to 1976 he was President of the East German state missions.

Jahn was married twice and had two children from his first marriage. In his retirement, Jahn, still active as a writer, moved back to Eyenbach (market town of Weiler-Simmerberg ) in the West Allgäu. He died in 2000 in the Bad Godesberg district of Bonn .

politics

Party career

After Jahn had made it to the position of Nazi command officer during the war , he joined the CDU in 1947 , also joined the Junge Union (JU) and later became the managing director and chairman of the JU Nordfriesland . He was elected chairman of the CDU district association Braunschweig- Stadt in 1968, was then chairman of the CDU regional association Braunschweig from 1970 to 1977 and was subsequently appointed honorary chairman. He was also a member of the state board of the CDU Lower Saxony and the federal committee of Christian Democrats .

Seats in parliament

Jahn was a member of the Husum district council from 1948 to 1951 . He was a member of the German Bundestag from 1965 to 1980 and devoted himself primarily to questions of foreign, defense and development policy. He was always drawn into parliament via the Lower Saxony state list. In addition, from 1970 to 1979 he was a seconded member of the Joint Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community , the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the forerunner of the European Parliament . There he was Vice-President of the Committee on Public Health and the Environment. As rapporteur, he formulated the position of the European Parliament on a large number of environmental policy projects, including a. the 1st and 2nd Environmental Action Programs (1973 and 1977) and the Birds Directive of 1979.

Before the first direct European elections in June 1979, Stern announced that Jahn had published Der Steppensturm in 1943 , which contained anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet hate speech "in the style of Nazi propaganda at the time". Jahn claimed "that he could not actually have written or thought something like that and expressed the assumption that such tirades had been incorporated by a third party." Wilfried Hasselmann , the CDU state chairman of Lower Saxony at the time, asked Jahn to waive his mandate if he did could not prove that he was not responsible for the offending text. Jahn then renounced the mandate for the first electoral term of the European Parliament in June 1979 .

Honors

• Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class , 1973

Publications

• The Steppe Storm - The Jewish-Bolshevik Imperialism . Müller, Dresden 1943 (controversial early publication)
• Cultural and information work of the western democracies , 1954
• Society and Democracy at the Turning Point , 1955
• Living Democracy , 1956
• Global political changes from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the atomic age , 1956
• For and against the military contribution , 1957
• Us and Time , 1958
• From the Bosphorus to Hawaii , 1958
• From Tierra del Fuego to Mexico. Latin America at a crossroads , 1962
• Turkey , 1963
• From the Cape to Cairo - Africa's Path to World Politics , 1963
• Pomeranian Passion , 1964
• CDU and co-determination , 1969
• The German Question from 1945 to the Present - The Way of the Parties and Governments , 1985
• East Pomerania (illustrated book), 1987
• At Adenauer's side - his advisor remembers , 1987

literature

• Manfred Hagel: Contemporary literature in the Lindau district . In: Werner Dobras / Andreas Kurz (eds.): At home in the Lindau district . Stadler Verlagsgesellschaft, Konstanz 1994, ISBN 3-7977-0281-7 , p. 200.
• Hans Edgar Jahn . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 45/2000 of October 30, 2000.
• Jan-Henrik Meyer: A Good European - Hans Edgar Jahn - Anti-Bolshevist, Cold-Warrior, Environmentalist . In: Ann-Christina L. Knudsen and Karen Gram-Skjoldager (Eds.): Living Political Biography: Narrating 20th Century European Lives . Aarhus University Press, Aarhus 2012, ISBN 978-87-7124-057-3 , pp. 137-159.

Web links

Commons : Hans Edgar Jahn  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Hans Edgar Jahn in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Jürgen Bevers: The man behind Adenauer: Hans Globke's rise from Nazi lawyer to gray eminence , Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3861535181 , p. 111
2. ↑ ^{a b} Tim Schanetzky : Adenauerzeit (part 4). When the journalists got cheeky . In: Die Zeit No. 44 of October 22, 2009.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hans Edgar Jahn . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 45/2000 of October 30, 2000.
4. ^ Personal details : Hans-Edgar Jahn , Der Spiegel, July 18, 1962
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Manfred Hagel: Contemporary literature in the Lindau district . In: Werner Dobras / Andreas Kurz (eds.): At home in the Lindau district . Stadler Verlagsgesellschaft, Konstanz 1994, ISBN 3-7977-0281-7 , p. 200.
6. ^ Jan-Henrik Meyer: Green Activism. The European Parliament's Environmental Committee promoting a European Environmental Policy in the 1970s . In: Journal of European Integration History vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 73–85, ISSN  0947-9511 , pp. 73–85, available from: Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.