Heinrich Krone

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Heinrich Krone (1961)
Krone (left) receives the chairman of the Liberal Party of Colombia, Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1964)

Heinrich Krone (born December 1, 1895 in Hessisch Oldendorf , † August 15, 1989 in Bonn ) was a German politician ( center , later CDU ).

From 1955 to 1961 he was chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group , from 1961 to 1964 federal minister for special tasks and from 1964 to 1966 federal minister for affairs of the Federal Defense Council .

Life

education and profession

After graduating from high school in 1914 at the Episcopal Gymnasium Josephinum in Hildesheim , Krone began studying Catholic theology , but was obliged to serve by the Prussian War Ministry in the same year . After the end of the First World War he completed a teaching degree for modern languages ​​and Latin from 1918 to 1920 in Münster , Göttingen and Kiel . During his studies he became a member of the Association of Scientific Catholic Student Associations Unitas .

He was after the clerkship to 1923 as an assistant teacher in Kiel worked and studied here at the same economics . 1923 doctorate he became Dr. phil. with a dissertation on the theory of the city supervised by Ferdinand Tönnies . In the Weimar Republic he was involved in the association for the defense of anti-Semitism . After 1933 he helped people who were harassed and persecuted by the National Socialists with the help of the "Aid Committee for Catholic Non-Aryans". In 1933 he protested in vain at the Ministry of the Interior because of the attack by the SA on civilians during the Koepenick Blood Week . From 1934 to 1935 he was managing director of the Caritas emergency service. After that, he had to keep his family afloat by doing odd jobs. After the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944 , he was imprisoned for a few weeks as part of the Grid Action , but not transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as planned .

family

Heinrich Krone had two brothers, Wilhelm (1887–1982) and Konrad (1899–1966), and was married to Emilie Janiak (1895–1989). He had four children with her:

Krones daughter-in-law Ursula Krone-Appuhn ( CSU ) was also a member of the Bundestag .

politics

Political party

In 1923 Krone joined the Center Party and organized rallies against Hitler's march on the Feldherrnhalle in Munich . From 1923 to 1929 he was Deputy Secretary General of the Center Party and from 1923 to 1929 initially managing director and then until 1933 federal leader of the Windthorstbund , the youth organization of the Center Party. Since 1926 Krone was a member of the federal board of the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold .

After the war ended, he was one of the founders of the CDU in Berlin in 1945 . To this end, in the early summer of 1945 he often met politicians such as Jakob Kaiser , Ernst Lemmer , Otto Lenz and Andreas Hermes , who, together with personalities from other areas, such as the Protestant pastor Heinrich Grüber , Professors Eduard Spranger and Ferdinand Sauerbruch , founded the establishment the Berlin CDU on the way. The appeal, which was co-decided and signed by the people named above, was broadcast on June 22, 1945 via radio.

In Berlin he was a member of the CDU state executive from 1947 to 1951.

MP

In 1925 he succeeded the late Peter Spahn and was then the youngest member of the Reichstag . He was a member of the Reichstag until the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. On March 23, 1933, Krone and his parliamentary group approved the Enabling Act .

From 1949 to 1969 he was a member of the German Bundestag , initially as a Berlin deputy, from 1965 on on the Lower Saxony state list. Here he was from August 1951 to June 15, 1955, Parliamentary Managing Director , from June 15, 1955 to 1961, Chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group . As a member of parliament and later as a minister, Krone was a close confidante of Konrad Adenauer , the then Federal Chancellor .

In 1952, Krone belonged to a group of 34 members of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group who introduced a bill to introduce relative majority voting in the Bundestag. Even at the time of the grand coalition , he continued to be an advocate of majority voting. Although they also found support from parts of the SPD , they were unable to prevail in the coalition as a whole.

Confidante of Adenauer

He has been one of Konrad Adenauer's closest political confidants, especially since he was chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group.

This familiarity developed slowly, not least because of the rather cool and authoritarian behavior of Adenauer towards Krones' predecessor Heinrich von Brentano , although Krone gained a high reputation in the Bundestag faction of the CDU / CSU in the early 1950s, partly by being under Brentano made up for the upset with his commitment. These came about because Brentano was accused of worrying more about foreign policy than, for example, the legislative procedure of parliamentarians, which, strictly speaking, belongs to the task of the parliamentary group chairman.

The ultimately successful ascent to Adenauer's confidante is mainly due to the fact that Krone shied away from the public and had no ambitions for the Chancellery or any other increase in power, but rather became Adenauer's work strategist in the background, which the Bundestag faction in line and Adenauer thus Back free. This earned him further respect in his own ranks, but also all kinds of malicious statements that caricatured him as a stiff and brittle politician. Among other things, the then Federal President Theodor Heuss described him as a “wooden, boring type of functionary”. This criticism, however, drowned out the positive feedback from within our own ranks, which Heinrich Krone recognized with statements such as “Papa Krone” or “Adenauer's all-purpose glue” and thus underscored Krones' achievements in terms of the group's cohesion.

Despite the modest ambitions attested to him, perhaps precisely because of this, he rose to one of the most powerful men in Bonn between 1955 and 1961 and in 1961 received the ministerial office for special tasks in Adenauer's cabinet. Before that, the CDU / CSU parliamentary group had internal deliberations in 1959 to set up Krone as its own candidate for the federal presidential election, which Krone refused. Despite these ambitions attested to by the parliamentary group, he could not clearly distance himself politically from Adenauer and thus could not develop an independent political profile in order to use the political doors that were opening for himself. Nevertheless, with the office of Federal Minister and Vice-President of the Federal Defense Council, Krone gained enormous power, which he used above all for his party and to establish new contacts. For Adenauer, this meant that after his resignation as Chancellor, he still had a certain influence on the day-to-day politics under his successor Ludwig Erhard (for whom Krone had also been traded) through the occupation of Heinrich Krones on the above-mentioned posts, as Krone through this Offices actively participated in the shaping of the foreign and security policy of the Federal Republic.

Public offices

On November 14, 1961 he was appointed Federal Minister for Special Tasks in the federal government led by Adenauer . He also retained this office under Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard , in whose cabinet he was then appointed Federal Minister for Affairs of the Federal Defense Council on July 13, 1964 . After the break of the coalition with the FDP and the resignation of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard from office, Krones' term as Federal Minister also ended on November 30, 1966. When his time as a member of the Bundestag ended after twenty years in 1969, he switched to the office of political advisor , in which he primarily helped shape East-West policy, for which the “Chancellor of Unity”, Helmut Kohl , expressly thanked him. However, Krone no longer saw the fruits of his labor, as he died three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989).

See also

Publications

literature

  • Karlies Abmeier: Heinrich Krone (1895-1989) . In: Wichmann-Jahrbuch des Diözesangeschichtsverein Berlin , vol. 44/45 (2004/2005), pp. 186–201.
  • Klaus Gotto : Heinrich Krone . In: Walther L. Bernecker , Volker Dotter Weich (eds.): Personality and Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany. Political portraits . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1982, Vol. 2, ISBN 3-525-03207-2 , pp. 37-48.
  • Ulrich von Hehl : The politician as a contemporary witness. Heinrich Krone as an observer of the Adenauer era . In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen , Vol. 5 (1998), pp. 83-104 ( PDF ).
  • Arno Richter: "Keiner vom Parkett" Heinrich Krone, a partial political biography (1895–1951) , Düsseldorf: Droste 2019 (research and sources on contemporary history; 71), ISBN 978-3-7700-1925-0 .
  • Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 146 ff.

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Krone  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Gotto: Heinrich Krone . In: Walther L. Bernecker, Volker Dotter Weich (eds.): Personality and Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany. Political portraits . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1982, Vol. 2, pp. 37-48, here p. 38.
  2. ↑ Auguste Zeiss-Horbach: The association for the defense of anti-Semitism. On the relationship between Protestantism and Judaism in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic . Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2008, ISBN 978-3-374-02604-3 , p. 163.
  3. ↑ 80 years after the Köpenick Blood Week - all strength against the right! Bund der Antifaschisten Köpenick , May 28, 2013, accessed on August 15, 2019 .
  4. ^ Ulrich von Hehl: The politician as a contemporary witness. Heinrich Krone as an observer of the Adenauer era . In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen , Vol. 5 (1998), pp. 83-104, here p. 84.
  5. ↑ Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen : Jugendreich, Gottesreich, Deutsches Reich. Young Generation, Religion and Politics, 1928–1933 . Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-8046-8684-2 , p. 331.
  6. ↑ Hans-Otto Kleinmann (arrangement): Heinrich Krone. Diaries , Vol. 1: 1945–1961 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, pp. 15-18.
  7. ↑ Udo Kempf, Hans-Georg Merz (ed.): Chancellor and Minister 1949–1998. Biographical Lexicon of the German Federal Governments . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, ISBN 3-531-13407-8 , p. 389.
  8. ^ Ulrich von Hehl: The politician as a contemporary witness. Heinrich Krone as an observer of the Adenauer era . In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen , Vol. 5 (1998), pp. 83-104, here p. 93.
personal data
SURNAME Krone, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (center, CDU), MdR, MdB
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Hessian Oldendorf
DATE OF DEATH August 15, 1989
Place of death Bonn