Heinrich Held (politician)

Heinrich Held (right) (1925)

Heinrich Held's birth house in Erbach

Heinrich Held (born June 6, 1868 in Erbach im Taunus , † August 4, 1938 in Regensburg ) was a German journalist and politician of the Bavarian People's Party (BVP). He was Bavarian Prime Minister from 1924 until his dismissal in 1933 .

Early years

Heinrich Held grew up as the son of the musician, farmer and businessman Johannes Held and his wife Susanne in Erbach. A plaque commemorates him on the house where he was born. From 1892 to 1896 he studied law , political science and history in Strasbourg , Marburg and Heidelberg . In Strasbourg he became a member of the Catholic fraternity Frankonia in the KV , for which he later became involved and to which he remained closely connected throughout his life. After the state examination in Strasbourg hero worked as a journalist in Strasbourg and Heidelberg, and finally in 1899 in Regensburg chief editor ofTo become the Regensburger Morgenblatt . In 1901 Held married Marie Habbel, daughter of Josef Habbel , the owner of the Morgenblatt and the other large Regensburger Zeitung, the Regensburger Anzeiger. In 1906, Held became editor and co-owner of the Regensburger Anzeiger , the oldest Regensburg newspaper, which he made into the most important Catholic conservative daily in Bavaria . During Held's time as Prime Minister of Bavaria (1924–1933), the Regensburger Anzeiger was given the status of an official government paper and fought fiercely against the National Socialist daily Bayerische Ostwacht . After the National Socialists came to power, the Regensburger Anzeiger was quickly driven into economic ruin with its publication bans.

Via a Regensburg municipal mandate, Held entered the Bavarian state parliament in 1907 as a member of the Center Party . In the same year he called for a new local electoral law for large Bavarian cities, which he was able to enforce in 1908 with the support of the Social Democrats . In a speech in the debate about the causes of the high infant mortality rate in Bavaria, he understood the various measures successfully taken in Regensburg, especially for the lower strata of the population, to reduce mortality - (maternal advice, nursing homes for single mothers, municipal milk control) - as To portray as an example for Bavaria. In 1914 he became parliamentary group chairman and shortly afterwards also state chairman of the Bavarian Center Party.

After the First World War, Held had belonged to the BVP, which he co-founded since 1918, which dissolved its parliamentary group with the Center Party in the Reichstag in January 1920 . From 1919 he was a member of the state parliament and from the same year until 1925 also chairman of the BVP parliamentary group. In 1921 he was president of the Katholikentag in Frankfurt am Main.

Prime Minister

After the resignation of Prime Minister Eugen Ritter von Knilling (BVP), Held was elected Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Bavaria on June 28, 1924 with the votes of the BVP, German National People's Party (DNVP), German People's Party (DVP) and the Bauernbund . He held this office uninterruptedly until the National Socialists illegally deposed him in 1933.

Held ran in the first ballot in the 1925 presidential election, but received only 3.7 percent of the vote. After his failure, he supported Paul von Hindenburg, the representative of the national conservative right against the center deputy Wilhelm Marx .

In the same year he concluded a concordat with the Holy See for the Free State of Bavaria . In 1925 a state treaty followed with the Protestant regional church. Held advocated a constitutional strengthening of the states in government memoranda on the Reich and constitutional reform in 1924, 1926 and 1928 as well as at the conference in Berlin , but was unable to assert himself.

In a protest speech at the beginning of 1925, Held sharply denounced the oppression and Italianization of the German-speaking population carried out by Italian fascism in South Tyrol . Benito Mussolini reacted to this with the decision to erect a monument to victory in Bolzano.

On January 4, 1925, Held received Adolf Hitler , who had been released from imprisonment in a fortress after the Hitler putsch , and who assured him that in future he would only pursue his goals by legal means. Held then lifted the ban on the NSDAP and the Volkischer Beobachter .

However, he clearly distinguished himself from the National Socialists and in 1930 issued the first uniform ban for the NSDAP. Held was a firm advocate of federalism ; this attitude intensified during Heinrich Brüning's era and the removal of the Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun by Chancellor Franz von Papen .

After a vote defeat in the state parliament in 1930, Held remained in office as managing director. In the winter of 1932/33 he made contact with Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria in order to appoint him General State Commissioner in the event of a National Socialist takeover of power under Article 64 of the Bavarian Constitution. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, however, Held hesitated to appoint the Crown Prince General State Commissioner or to restore the monarchy in Bavaria to protect against the conformity with the system.

On March 9, 1933, Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick transferred executive power in Bavaria to Franz Ritter von Epp . On the same day, Adolf Wagner , Ernst Röhm , Heinrich Himmler and Ritter von Epp had the still incumbent Prime Minister of the SA people forcibly fetched him to the Brown House and declared him deposed. Interior Minister Karl Stützel , who was also arrested , was mistreated on this occasion. The government building was then occupied. In vain did Held telegraph his complaints to the Presidential Palace in Berlin. Just three days later, Hitler went to Munich. On March 15, 1933, Held resigned from his position and retired to Regensburg for private life. There the newly formed city council with 22 seats for the BVP still had more seats than the NSDAP with 10 and the SPD with 5 seats in accordance with the arbitrarily enacted "law to align the states with the Reich". Nevertheless, on May 29, 1933, the city council elected Otto Schottenheim, a member of the NSDAP, as mayor. On June 21, 1933, Heinrich Held's house was searched, the SPD was banned on June 25, and the BVP was forced to dissolve itself on July 4.

The son Philipp Held was Minister of Justice in Bavaria from 1966 to 1974.

Honors

Because of his services to the promotion of the Rhine-Main-Danube shipping Held was in 1917 by King Ludwig III. appointed Privy Councilor . The city of Regensburg granted him honorary citizenship in 1926 . Held received by several Bavarian and Austrian universities, the Technical University of Dresden , the honorary doctorate . Held also became an honorary philistine of the KV connections K.St.V. Rhenania Innsbruck and K.St.V. Ottonia Munich. He was also a member of the KDSt.V. Rheno-Franconia Munich in the CV .

literature

• Josef Held: Heinrich Held. A life for Bavaria . Zeit und Welt, Regensburg 1958.
• Richard Keßler : Heinrich Held as a parliamentarian. A partial biography 1868–1924 . Contributions to a historical structural analysis of Bavaria in the industrial age, volume 6. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin (West) 1971, 532 pp., ISBN 3-428-02434-6 .
• Siegfried Koß in: Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon des KV. 2nd part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 3). SH-Verlag, Schernfeld 1993, ISBN 3-923621-98-1 , p. 46 f.
• Hellmuth Auerbach :  Hero, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 463 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Winfried Becker : Heinrich Held (1868–1938). The rise and fall of the Bavarian parliamentarian and prime minister. In: Journal for Bavarian State History 72 (2009), pp. 807-891 ( digitized version ).
• Winfried Becker: Heinrich Held . In: Katharina Weigand (ed.): Great figures of Bavarian history . Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2012, pp. 357–379, ISBN 978-3-8316-0949-9 .

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Held  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Works by and about Heinrich Held  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about Heinrich Held in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Dieter Albrecht: Regensburg im Wandel, studies on the history of the city in the 19th and 20th centuries . In: Museums and Archives of the City of Regensburg (Hrsg.): Studies and sources on the history of Regensburg . tape 2 . Mittelbayerische Verlags-Gesellschaft mbH, Regensburg 1984, ISBN 3-921114-11-X , p. 17th f., 221 ff .
2. ↑ Georg Köglmeier: The political and social conditions in Regensburg 1910 . In: Peter Germann Bauer / Helmut Groschwitz (eds.): Catalog for the 2010 exhibition Tradition and Awakening 1910 . Museums of the City of Regensburg 2010, Regensburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-935052-83-2 , p. 33-39 .
3. ↑ Federico Scarano: La lunga strada di Mussolini verso le opzioni dei sudtirolesi nel 1939 . In: Maddalena Guiotto, Wolfgang Wohnout (Hrsg.):: Italy and Austria in Central Europe of the Interwar Period / Italia e Austria nella Mitteleuropa tra le due guerre mondiali . Böhlau, Vienna 2018, ISBN 978-3-205-20269-1 , p. 266 .
4. ↑ Laurence Cole: “Land divided and tales divided. Cultures of remembrance of the First World War in the successor regions of the Crown Land of Tyrol ». In: Hannes Obermair u. a. (Ed.): Regional civil society in motion - Cittadini innanzi tutto . Vienna-Bozen: Folio Verlag 2012, ISBN 978-3-85256-618-4 , pp. 502-531, reference p. 513.
5. ↑ Stefan Lorant: I was Hitler's prisoner. Ein Tagebuch 1933. List, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-471-78034-3 , p. 23.
6. ↑ Honorary doctorates from Innsbruck University. Neue Freie Presse, Abendblatt, November 19, 1928, p. 1, bottom left [1]
7. ↑ The Innsbruck honorary doctorate for Dr. Hainisch and Dr. Hero. Neue Freie Presse, Morgenblatt, November 20, 1928, p. 6, center right [2]
8. ^ Directory of honorary doctoral candidates at the TH / TU Dresden