Harald Abatz

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Harald Abatz (born September 29, 1893 in Hamburg ; † January 2, 1954 there ) was a German politician of the FDP .

Life and work

Abatz lost his parents at an early age and initially completed a commercial apprenticeship after graduating from secondary school. He then worked for a few years as an employee in a Hamburg trading company. In the First World War he was seriously wounded and started his own business as a sales representative. At the same time he made up his Abitur, then studied law and later settled as a lawyer in Hamburg. During National Socialism, he worked in the Free Hamburg resistance group around Friedrich Ablass . After the end of the Nazi dictatorship, he was first involved in the committee of former political prisoners and later in the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime , from which he resigned at the end of 1950 because of the increasing communist influence. He was federal chairman of the German Peace Society and campaigned in particular for the right to conscientious objection and against the rearmament of Germany. In February 1947, he and Max Stierwaldt , the DFG federal chairman, presented a draft for a law against war. He died on January 2, 1954 as a result of a groin operation. Abatz was a Freemason .

Political party

In the Weimar Republic Abatz belonged to the Young Democrats and the DDP . Since the late 1920s he was chairman of the DDP district association St. Pauli . At the state party conference of the Hamburg DDP in September 1928, he advocated that it should support the popular initiative initiated by the KPD against the construction of the armored cruiser A , but this application failed. Although an opponent of the merger with the Young German Order to form the German State Party , Abatz remained in contrast to other representatives of the left wing, such as B. Erich Lüth and Alfred Johann Levy , still party members. He justified this with wanting to represent the “democratic conscience” in the new party.

After the Second World War , he initially participated in the establishment of the non-partisan Bund Free Hamburg , which emerged from the resistance group of the same name. Within this association he belonged to the group of those who preferred to found a party. Together with Eduard Wilkening and Friedrich Ablass, he pushed through a manifesto for the establishment of a liberal party at the general meeting of the BFH on August 16, 1945, which led to the establishment of the Free Democrats Party on September 20, 1945 , later the Hamburg regional association of the FDP. Abatz was elected to the PFD board at the founding assembly and was also the author of the new party's first programmatic guidelines. Together with Willy Max Rademacher and Georg Borkmann , he headed the economic policy committee of the PFD / FDP in the 1940s and was also the editor-in-chief of the Hamburg party newspaper Die Freie Stadt . In 1947 he was elected to the board of the FDP for the British zone of occupation.

From the end of 1949 Abatz participated within the Hamburg FDP in the democratic circle in which the left wing of the state party came together. In the same year he was also re-elected to the state executive committee of the FDP, after having failed in the election a year earlier. On January 20, 1951, along with Hans-Harder Biermann-Ratjen , Emmy Beckmann , Lieselotte Anders , Anton Leser and Max Dibbern, he was one of the signatories of the appeal for a liberal collection by Edgar Engelhard , which opposed the plans of the state associations of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Hesse decided to turn the FDP into a party of the National Collection. Because of his support for the petition of the Emergency Community for Peace in Europe by Gustav Heinemann and Helene Wessel , the North Rhine-Westphalian FDP applied for the exclusion of Abatz and Edgar Engelhard, who had also signed this petition, but failed at the Federal Main Committee on May 17, 1952. After the state elections in 1953, Abatz applied for one of the five senatorial posts that the FDP was able to fill within the Hamburg bloc . However, he could not prevail at the meeting of the FDP state committee on November 8, 1953.

MP

Abatz belonged to the Hamburg citizenship from 1949 until his death , after he had run in the 1946 state election in vain in the constituency of Rahlstedt . From 1949 to 1951 and from 1953 until his death he was Vice President of the City Council.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hamburg State Archives 622-1 / 161 Abatz pdf
  2. ↑ So z. B. in an article in the Free City of April 29, 1949.
  3. ↑ Christof Brauers, The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953, Martin Meidenbauer Verlagbuchhandlung, Munich 2007, page 382.
  4. ↑ Brauers, page 116.
  5. ↑ Brauers, p. 71.
  6. ↑ Abatz at the party congress on August 6, 1930, quoted from Hamburger Anzeiger of August 7, 1930
  7. ↑ Brauers, page 488.
personal data
SURNAME Abatz, Harald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DDP, FDP), MdHB
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH 2nd January 1954
Place of death Hamburg