Helmut Lemke (politician)

Clifford Campbell and Federal Council President Helmut Lemke (1967)

Candidate poster for the state election in Schleswig-Holstein in 1979

Helmut Bernhard Julius Lemke called von Soltenitz (born September 29, 1907 in Kiel , † April 15, 1990 in Lübeck ) was a German politician ( NSDAP and CDU ). He was Minister of Education from 1954 to 1955, Minister of the Interior from 1955 to 1963 and Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein from 1963 to 1971 . From 1971 to 1983 he was President of the State Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein .

Life

Born as the son of the future Rear Admiral (engineer) Franz Lemke and his wife Friederike née Voigt, Helmut Lemke studied law and political science in Tübingen and Kiel after graduating from high school in 1925 at the Kiel School of Academics . In 1928 he did the trainee lawyer and in 1932 the assessor exam . 1929 doctorate he attended the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg to the Dr. iur. In the Second World War he was an officer in the Navy , most recently he held the rank of first lieutenant at sea .

From 1945 to 1948, Lemke served in the international mine clearance service . Lemke had been a member of the administrative law council since 1949 and later began working as a lawyer and notary and specialist lawyer for administrative law in Lübeck.

Lemke married Annemarie Petersen from Kiel on January 12, 1933 in Kiel and had four children with her. The son Klaus was senior district director in Gifhorn, Lower Saxony . The son Volker was a member of the state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein.

Act

From 1932 to 1933 Lemke was a court assessor at the public prosecutor's offices in Kiel and Altona. In the time of National Socialism Lemke became mayor of Eckernförde as a member of the NSDAP from 1933. In this function he took a clear position for National Socialism and its methods. He publicly emphasized: “We National Socialists stand on the basis of the Führer principle . We all, each in his place, are called to execute the hammer blows of the Third Reich. ”On his orders, numerous Social Democrats and Communists were arrested in Eckernförde that same month . Two of them, the KPD local chairman Hermann Ivers and Heinrich Otto, were later killed by the National Socialists. Lemke held the office of mayor of Schleswig from 1937 to May 1945 .

In the post-war period , Lemke became a member of the CDU. Since 1950 he was a member of the state executive. 1951 to 1954 he was a senator in Lübeck and deputy mayor. From 1964 to 1971 he was state chairman of the CDU in Schleswig-Holstein . From 1963 to 1971 he was also a member of the CDU federal executive committee . From 1955 to 1976 he was district chairman of the CDU in the Segeberg district . Lemke was a member of the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament from 1955 to 1983 . On October 13, 1954, he was appointed minister of culture to the state government headed by Prime Minister Kai-Uwe von Hassel . On October 25, 1955, he took over the management of the Ministry of the Interior.

After Kai-Uwe von Hassel had become Federal Minister of Defense in January 1963 as the successor to Franz Josef Strauss , Lemke was elected as his successor to the office of Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein on January 7, 1963. The election was preceded by a conflict between the CDU and FDP. Both parties had campaigned for a continuation of the CDU-FDP coalition. After this was confirmed in the state elections in Schleswig-Holstein in 1962 , this coalition failed because of the FDP's demand for two ministerial directors. Von Hassel, who lacked a majority by just one vote, therefore initially led a minority government. After his resignation, however, Helmut Lemke's election required an absolute majority. In the vote, 35 of the 68 MPs voted for him, three against him and 30 abstained. This gave him one more vote than the CDU had in the state parliament and a majority in the first ballot.

After the election he quickly succeeded in reuniting the Christian-Liberal coalition. On January 14, 1963, he presented his Lemke I cabinet , in which the FDP chairman Bernhard Leverenz was a minister. In 1963 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

After the state elections in Schleswig-Holstein in 1971 , Lemke resigned from his post as Prime Minister on May 24, 1971 and was President of the State Parliament until April 12, 1983.

In 1983 Lemke withdrew from politics. To this day he is the longest-serving president of the state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein. He returned to Lübeck, where he practiced as a lawyer again. In addition, he kept responding with speeches and articles. When the Barschel affair shook Schleswig-Holstein and the CDU there in 1987/88, Barschels' former sponsor felt obliged to help his party. Together with Kai-Uwe von Hassel, he tried to limit the damage to the CDU and supported the election of Ottfried Hennig as the new state chairman.

Helmut Lemke died on April 15, 1990 in Lübeck. He was honored with a state ceremony in Lübeck Cathedral . His estate is in the Schleswig-Holstein State Archives.

Social Commitment

From 1963 to 1980 Helmut Lemke was President of the German Forest Protection Association (SDW). Since 1926 he was a member of the Academic Society Stuttgardia Tübingen . In 1957 he was Corp. loop carrier of Holsatia . In 1962 he received her ribbon .

Controversy

Klaus Staeck took up Lemke's National Socialist past in 1976 with reference to the election campaign statement freedom instead of socialism . Karl Otto Meyer , resistance fighter against National Socialism and later top politician of the South Schleswig voters' association , however, attested Lemke that he had credibly transformed into a democrat in the post-war period.

literature

• Uwe Danker: The state parliament and the past. The topic of "coming to terms with the past" in the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament 1947–1992. In: Democratic History , Volume 17 (2006), pp. 187-208. (PDF; 1.3 MB)
• Jessica von Seggern: Old and New Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein. Democratization and new formation of a political elite at district and state level 1945 to 1950 (historical communications, supplements, volume 61), Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08801-6 .

Web links

Commons : Helmut Lemke  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Helmut Lemke in the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament information system

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jessica von Seggern: Old and New Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein. Democratization and re-formation of a political elite at district and state level 1945 to 1950 (= historical communications, supplements, volume 61). Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08801-6 , p. 214.
2. ^ Erich Maletzke, Klaus Volquartz: The Schleswig-Holstein Landtag . 1983, pp. 102-103.
3. ^ Friedrich Prüser , Thomas Achelis: List of members Corps Holsatia 1813–1963 , 479, 1201.
   Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 78 , 613.
4. ↑ Uwe Danker: The Landtag and the past. The topic of "coming to terms with the past" in the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament 1947–1992. In: Democratic History , Volume 17 (2006), pp. 187-208. (PDF; 1.3 MB), here p. 200 f.
5. ↑ Defamation is a tradition , Der Tagesspiegel of July 26, 2009.