Harald Koch (politician, 1907)

Harald Albrecht Friedrich Koch (born March 4, 1907 in Bant , now Wilhelmshaven , † September 18, 1992 in Dortmund ) was a German SPD politician .

Life and work

Harald Koch was born as the son of the lawyer and notary Adolf Koch and his wife Elisabeth Koch, née Eggers. The father's brother was the DDP Minister Erich Koch-Weser . Harald Koch first attended the humanistic Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium (now Gymnasium am Mühlenweg) and then studied law and political science in Freiburg im Breisgau , Berlin and Göttingen . In Freiburg he became a member of the Alemannia fraternity in the DB in 1926 . He completed his legal clerkship up to the assessor exam in Oldenburg . For political reasons he left the civil service in 1934. He studied again, this time at the Leipzig Commercial College , where he graduated as a tax expert in 1936. He then worked in various auditing companies, then assistant at the tax institute of the Leipzig Graduate School of Management. After the National Socialist seizure of power, Koch left the intended further activity in local government , not least because he had a Jewish grandmother (Marianne Lewenstein from Burhave ) on his father's side . Therefore, he switched to the private sector and from 1940 he was authorized signatory and syndic of the Maxhütte in Sulzbach-Rosenberg. In these functions he experienced the end of the war and continued to run the company for several months as an “unencumbered” person. When he was to be awarded the Civil War Merit Cross in 1942 , he refused on the grounds that he wanted to wait for a "Peace Merit Cross".

After the end of the Second World War he returned to Oldenburg. Harald Koch, who had been interested in politics since his youth and had been in opposition to the National Socialist regime, was initially appointed by Prime Minister Theodor Tantzen on the recommendation of his older brother Ekhard (1902–2000), who initiated the reorganization of the judiciary in Oldenburg Ministerial Director for Finances appointed to the Oldenburg State Service .

After years of ministerial and parliamentary activity in the then still existing state of Oldenburg and then in Lower Saxony and as a Hessian minister and member of the Bundestag , Koch was appointed Labor Director of Hoesch Werke AG in 1953 at the suggestion of the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) . Before that, Koch had played a key role in drafting the co-determination law for the coal and steel industry. After the merger of Hoesch with Dortmund-Hörder Hüttenunion AG in 1966, he left the board in 1968 as part of the administrative reorganization. He switched to the supervisory board, where he was deputy chairman until 1972.

Harald Koch was particularly committed to the Dortmund Social Research Center . For many years he was a member of the board of trustees of the Society for the Promotion of the Dortmund Social Research Center, a member of the board of directors and its chairman from 1970 to 1978. During his tenure, the facility was relocated and threatened with closure. It was only after lengthy negotiations and with the support of the then Science Minister Johannes Rau that it was able to establish itself in Dortmund. In November 1989, Harald Koch resigned from the company's board of directors.

Harald Koch also played a key role in promoting international understanding. As early as 1956, he had become chairman of the then Rheinisch-Westfälische Auslandsgesellschaft (RWAG), which still exists today under the name Auslandsgesellschaft Nordrhein-Westfalen eV (AgNRW), and promoted its development over three decades. He also campaigned for the construction of a Carl Duisberg House in Dortmund. His efforts to come to an understanding with the Eastern Bloc led him to the head of the union of all German-Soviet societies in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Harald Koch was married to Elfi Koch, nee Stoll. The couple had two sons. He died in the Lücklemberg district of Dortmund .

politics

Although Koch came from a politically liberal family - the well-known DDP politician of the Weimar Republic Erich Koch-Weser (1875–1944) was his uncle and, according to his own statements, Koch's political foster father - he joined the SPD. He justified this step with his experiences from the Weimar period and the failure of liberalism during the rise of the National Socialists. From 1946 he was the Oldenburg Minister of Finance and Economics in the Tantzen II cabinet . After the unification of Oldenburg with the states of Hanover, Braunschweig and Schaumburg-Lippe on November 8, 1946, he belonged to the appointed Lower Saxony state parliament and was chairman of the constitutional policy committee. In January 1947, on the recommendation of Kurt Schumacher, he was appointed Minister for Economics and Transport of the State of Hesse in the Cabinet Stock . As minister he was responsible for the nationalization according to Article 41 of the Hessian constitution. His draft law on the "social communities" with the participation of the trade unions, workforces, municipalities and the former owners of the companies did not find a majority in the state parliament. Businesses that had already been converted into this economic form had to be returned to their owners in the early 1950s.

When he was elected to the first German Bundestag for the constituency of Offenbach am Main , he resigned from his ministerial office in November 1949. In the Bundestag he was a member of the SPD parliamentary group executive committee and, among other things, was deputy chairman of the committee for finance and tax issues . Above all, he campaigned for coal and steel co-determination and is considered one of the fathers of the coal and steel co-determination law . Harald Koch gave up his Bundestag mandate in 1953 for professional reasons.

Harald Koch (second from right) and the other members of the Expert Council, February 1964

In 1964, Federal President Heinrich Lübke appointed Harald Koch to the Advisory Council for the assessment of macroeconomic developments , which advised the Federal Government on economic policy issues. Five years later, he announced his resignation from this body. He then held other public offices, for example he was a member of the Energy Advisory Board of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, in the Economic Policy Committee of the party executive of the SPD and in the Chamber for Social Order of the Protestant Church in Germany.

Awards

On November 28, 1981, Harald Koch was granted honorary citizenship of the city of Dortmund. The building of the foreign company North Rhine-Westphalia (formerly RWAG) is now called Harald-Koch-Haus . His former home, the former Villa Opländer , is also named after him today. In 1991 Harald Koch was awarded the Hans Böckler Prize .

Fonts

• Direct debit and bank transfer . 1932.
• The public corporations in sales tax law . 1939.
• Legal form of socialization with special consideration of socialization in Hessen . Law and Law, Hamburg 1947.
• Harald Koch (ed.): The social communities . Legal and political science publisher, Hamburg 1948.
• Rules of Procedure of the German Bundestag, adopted on December 6, 1951. Text and commentary . Commentator, Frankfurt am Main 1952.
• The importance of co-determination in Germany for the position of the employee in the economy . 1959.
• Economic and socio-political experiences with co-determination . In: Heinz Wolf (Hrsg.): Economic co-determination in the contemporary discussion . Deutz, Düsseldorf 1966, p. 83 ff .
• Codetermination as a socio-political task . In: Fritz Bauer (Ed.): The New Society . tape 13 . Neue Gesellschaft, 1966, ISSN  0028-3177 , p. 277 ff .
• Sociopolitical demands on the corporate constitution . Frankfurt Legal Society, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
• Economy in the field of tension between politics and science . In: Herbert Scholz (Ed.): The role of science in modern society . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, p. 172 ff .

literature

• Koch, Harald. In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg . Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , pp. 378-379 ( online ).
• Britta Leise: Cook, Harald Albrecht Friedrich . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 3 . Klartext, Essen 2001, ISBN 3-88474-954-4 , p. 117 ff .
• Obituary . In: Hoesch AG (Hrsg.): Werk und Wir . No. 1 , 1992, ISSN  0508-3192 .
• Harald Koch . In: Ludwig Munzinger (Hrsg.): Internationales Biographisches Archiv . People currently. No. 45 . Munzinger Archive, October 26, 1992, ISSN  0020-9457 , ZDB -ID 2042075-4 ( munzinger.de [accessed December 8, 2011]).
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 3: I-L. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0865-0 , pp. 120-122.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ manager magazin 6/1975, pp. 75-77
2. ^ Britta Leise: Koch, Harald Albrecht Friedrich . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 3 . Klartext, Essen 2001, ISBN 3-88474-954-4 , p. 117 ff .
3. ↑ boeckler.de ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )