Hans von der Groeben

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Hans von der Groeben (1965)

Hans Georg Max Joachim von der Groeben (born May 14, 1907 in Langheim , Rastenburg district ; † March 6, 2005 in Rheinbach ) was a German diplomat , scientist and publicist and from 1958 to 1970 EEC commissioner .

Life

Langheim Castle around 1860, Alexander Duncker collection

Hans von der Groeben was the son of the East Prussian landowner Georg von der Groeben and his wife Eva von Mirbach . His older brother Klaus von der Groeben became an administrative lawyer. Hans studied law and economics at the universities of Berlin , Bonn and Göttingen . After passing the major legal state examination, he joined the Reich Ministry of Food as a senior government councilor in 1933 , where he took over the management of the credit and cooperative department in 1937, most recently as senior government councilor.

From late 1939 and from 1942 to 1945 he served in the Wehrmacht , most recently as a lieutenant in the reserve. During the war, von der Groeben also worked as a ministerial official in the Reich Ministry of Food , which was headed by Walther Darré . After Darré was overthrown in May 1942, Herbert Backe became his provisional successor, whereupon he resigned from Groeben and Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg , a man of active resistance against Adolf Hitler , took over his office. In the summer of 1942, von der Groeben was called up again and transferred to southern France in the autumn of that year . During this time von der Groeben stayed in contact with Schulenburg and was also informed about his resistance plans. In the spring of 1944 he tried in Avignon together with Army Judge Karl Sack to win General Georg von Sodenstern for the overthrow. Sack, who was executed in April 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp as a result of the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , and von Sodenstern evidently did not reveal him. There was no persecution by the Gestapo .

After the war he worked as a government director in the Lower Saxony Ministry of Finance . Federal Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard recruited him from there and made him head of the “Schuman Plan” sub-department. Since 1953 the ministerial director has also represented the federal government in the coordination committee of the coal and steel union .

He is one of the fathers of the European Economic Community (EEC). Groeben was one of the authors of the “ Spaak Report ”, which was decisive for the establishment and structure of the EEC . He was chairman of the “Common Market” committee at the 1956 Intergovernmental Conference in Brussels . Mainly, he made sure that the EEC received a contractually defined market economy framework.

When the Treaty of Rome came into force on January 1, 1958, Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer sent him as the second member from the Federal Republic - alongside Commission President Walter Hallstein - to the new EEC Commission in Brussels, with the often and often quoted clairvoyant words: “Help to get results quickly. After 30 years everything starts again ”.

As the person responsible for competition policy, von der Groeben set milestones for European antitrust law, for the introduction of the value added tax system as well as for the harmonization of tax systems and for the European Community patent. The European antitrust law passed in December 1961 is primarily due to his efforts to unite French and German antitrust law. In 1967 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Frankfurt am Main . After leaving the Commission in 1970, he advised the CDU on issues of European politics and was active as a scientist and journalist. In 1987 he received the Jean Monnet Prize from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Foundation in Basel.

In 1934 he married Gunhild von Rosenberg. The marriage had three children. After divorcing his first wife, he married Ilse Freiin von und zu Gilsa in 1974.

Awards

Works

  • Europe. Plan and reality. Speeches - Reports - Essays on European Politics , 1967
  • The European economic community as the engine of social and political integration , lectures and essays by the Walter Eucken Institute, 25th 1970
  • Aims and methods of European integration , report on a working group in the center for interdisciplinary research at Bielefeld University. Frankfurt, 1972, with Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker (Ed.)
  • Constitution or Technocracy for Europe , 1974
  • Commentary on the EEC Treaty , 2., neubearb. Edition, 2 volumes, 1974, with Hans von Boeckh and Jochen Thiesing (eds.)
  • Possibilities and limits of the European Union with Hans Möller, 1976–1980
  • History of the German District Assembly , with Hans-Jürgen von der Heide, 1981
  • The European Community and the challenges of our time. - Articles and speeches 1967–1987 , 1987, ISBN 3-7890-1406-0 .
  • Commentary on the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Establishment of the European Community, 6th edition, 4 volumes, 2003 , with Jürgen Schwarze (Ed.), ISBN 3-7890-8292-9 .
  • Maastricht Treaty on European Union with conclusions of the Lisbon European Council , with a foreword by Jacques Delors, annex to the commentary on the EEC Treaty, with Jochen Thiesing and Claus-Dieter Ehlermann , 1992
  • Germany and Europe in a troubled century. Experiences and reflections , 1995

literature

  • Rudolf Hrbek , Volker Schwarz (Ed.): 40 Years of the Treaty of Rome. The German contribution. Documentation of the conference on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Dr. hc Hans von der Groeben . Nomos, Baden-Baden 1998, ISBN 3-7890-5435-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Mareike König, Matthias Schulz (ed.): The Federal Republic of Germany and European Unification 1949-2000. Political actors, social forces and international experiences. Stuttgart 2004, pp. 89 f., ISBN 3-515-08465-7 .
  2. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Groeben, Hans von der
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Groeben, Hans Georg Max Joachim von der (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (independent), scientist, publicist and member of the European Commission (1958–1970)
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Langheim , Rastenburg district
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 2005
Place of death Rheinbach