Hans Katzer

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Hans Katzer, 1978

Hans Katzer (born January 31, 1919 in Cologne ; † July 18, 1996 there ) was a German politician ( CDU ). From 1965 to 1969 he was Federal Minister for Labor and Social Affairs .

Life and work

Gravestone in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne

Katzer was born on January 31, 1919, the son of Karl Katzer, the secretary of the Catholic Journeyman's Association , and his wife Rosa (née Franke). His father had stayed in Cologne as a carpenter who came from Bohemia. He sat for the center from 1919 to 1933 in the Cologne Council and lost his mandate and his position as editor of the Kolping Gazette after the Nazi “ seizure of power ” . The resulting financial hardship forced Hans Katzer to drop out of secondary school after secondary school and to give up his dream of being an architect . After attending the advanced school for the textile industry completed Katzer commercial training he had with the commercial assistant examination completed. He had been a member of the Catholic youth association "New Germany" since 1929 and was its last director in Cologne until its forced dissolution in 1939. After completing the Reich Labor Service , he took part in World War II as a soldier from 1939 to 1945 . After being shot in the lung off Moscow in the winter of 1941/42 , he was in the hospital for a year and then, meanwhile promoted to lieutenant in the infantry, was sent to Metz for officer training . After brief captivity , Katzer was released in 1945.

Since Katzer was politically completely unencumbered and came from a family connected to political Catholicism , he was able to make a career quickly. On the mediation of Johannes Albers , he started at the Cologne employment office in 1945 , where he was promoted to head of department with responsibility for advanced training and retraining in 1948. At the beginning of 1950 he became the full-time federal manager of the social committees of the Christian-Democratic workforce (until 1963) and employee of the journals Social Order and Works Council Letters . He was a member of the Public Services, Transport and Traffic Union (ÖTV).

Katzer met his future wife Elisabeth, a daughter of Jakob Kaiser , who was doing an internship there at the Cologne employment office . In 1949 they married. The marriage produced a daughter.

Political party

In 1945 Katzer was one of the founders of the Cologne CDU. Here he was mainly involved in the social committees of the Christian Democratic Workers' Union ( CDA ), of which he became chief executive in 1950. Within the Union, Katzer was one of the most prominent representatives of the workers' wing, who all his life represented the idea of ​​a unified trade union in the DGB and therefore also rejected the founding of the Christian trade union movement in 1955. Of course, he repeatedly urged the DGB to be politically neutral. In 1972, an expulsion procedure was even applied for against him. From 1963 to 1977 he was chairman of the CDA. In 1977 he became President of the European Union of Christian Democratic Workers, which he co-founded .

From 1969 to 1980 he was also deputy federal chairman of the CDU. In the federal election campaigns in 1972 and 1976, he was accepted by the CDU chancellor candidates Rainer Barzel and Helmut Kohl in their core and government teams and, if successful, should have taken over the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Katzer was unable to assert himself within the CDU with his demand for greater co-determination; At the Hamburg party congress in 1973, the “Katzer model” with an equal weighting of the factors labor and capital in the vote was subject to the model of the CDU federal executive committee, which gave the capital owners the decision-making vote in the event of a tie. In terms of foreign policy, he belonged to the minority within the Union that supported the Eastern Treaties , although he abstained in the Bundestag for reasons of party tactics.

In 1962, in memory of his father-in-law, Katzer founded the Jakob Kaiser Foundation , which he chaired until 1994.

Mandates and public offices

On November 9, 1952, Katzer was elected to the Cologne City Council. After his election to the Bundestag in 1957 , he gave up his mandate as city councilor on January 16, 1958.

From 1957 to 1980 he was a member of the German Bundestag , where he was directly elected to represent constituency 68 (Cologne III), and then moved in in 1965 via the state list of North Rhine-Westphalia. From 1961 to 1965 he was chairman of the Bundestag committee for economic property of the federal government. Here he was deputy chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group from 1969 to 1979 . In 1973, as coordinator, he took over the management of the parliamentary group's and party’s planning staff. From 1979 to 1984 he was a member of the first directly elected European Parliament and served as its vice-president from 1979 to 1982.

After the federal election in 1965 , he was appointed Federal Minister for Labor and Social Affairs on October 26, 1965, in the federal government led by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard . There, however, as a member of the “string quintet”, he had to propose concrete socio-political austerity measures. The planned reduction in social benefits led to a dispute with Erhard in October 1966. He also heads the same department in the cabinet of the grand coalition headed by Kurt Georg Kiesinger . His services included u. a. the improvement of provisions for war victims and the 1969 Employment Promotion Act, which changed the Nuremberg Federal Agency from a pure disbursement authority to a service provider oriented towards active labor market policy. During his tenure, the change from a welfare policy to an active social policy intensified. After the Bundestag election in 1969 , Katzer resigned from the federal government on October 21, 1969. He also played a decisive role in creating the people's shares, the 312 Mark Act ( asset formation for employees ) including its amendment in 1965 (to 624 DM) and the Performance Promotion Act.

honors and awards

Katzer received the Great Cross of Merit with a Star in 1969 and the shoulder ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1973. In 1977 he was elected honorary chairman for life of the CDA's social committees. In 1987 he was awarded the Hans Böckler Prize in recognition of his services to the unified union, a late reparation. A year later he also received the Ludger Westrick Prize . The Hans-Katzer-Haus of the CDU-Marl and a street in Cologne-Junkersdorf are named after Katzer .

Posthumous reception

Der Spiegel paid tribute to Katzer in an obituary.

“With cleverly deployed threats of resignation, the CDU politician often prevented social cuts and ensured dynamic pensions. He defied the economic wing of his party - despite painful defeats - an almost equal participation in large companies. For many entrepreneurs he was a "black communist" or a "Herz-Jesu-Marxist". "

On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of his death, Norbert Röttgen described Hans Katzer as the "inventor of social partnership".

Works (selection)

  • Stability and progress. Wording of the speech to the Federal Conference of the Standing Committee of Christian-Social Workers' Congresses on October 1, 1966 in Nuremberg. o. O., o. J.
  • Aspects of modern social policy. Cologne 1969.
  • Adaptation or Integration? On the social situation of older people. Eichholz 1973.
  • Social partnership. In: Rainer Barzel (ed.): Great moments of parliament. Heidelberg 1989, pp. 223-246.

literature

  • Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, pp. 141ff.
  • Ulf Fink (ed.): Hans Katzer - partnership instead of class struggle. Cologne, 1989.
  • Birgit Frese: Impetus for social reform. Hans Katzer, the social committees and their proposals for creating an economic order based on partnership. Dissertation Düsseldorf 2000.
  • Günter letter : Hans Katzer. In memory of a Rhenish social politician. In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen 5 (1998), pp. 167–174.
  • Günter letter: Hans Katzer (1919–1996). In: Contemporary history in life pictures. From the German Catholicism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume 11. Münster 2004, pp. 300-312, 347-348.

Web links

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

See also Cabinet Erhard II , Cabinet Kiesinger

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Katzer obituary notice (In Memoriam) , FAZ , July 18, 2016
  2. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 25, No. 43, March 9, 1973.
  3. ↑ DER SPIEGEL , edition 30/1996
  4. ↑ rp-online: Hans Katzer - inventor of the social partnership (accessed on December 11, 2011)
personal data
SURNAME Katzer, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), Member of the Bundestag, MEP
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH July 18, 1996
Place of death Cologne