Helmut von Verschuer

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Helmut Freiherr von Verschuer (born December 6, 1926 in Tübingen ), also known as Helmut van Verschuer on the European level , is a German European civil servant and agricultural politician . He has lived in Belgium since 1958 .

Life

Helmut von Verschuer is one of the original Dutch noble family (van or by) Verschuer and is a son of the physician Otmar von Verschuer , of a leading proponent of human genetics in the era of National Socialism was and in the Federal Republic. He attended the model school in Frankfurt am Main and studied agricultural science at the Technical University of Munich in Munich-Weihenstephan (1947–1948) and the University of Gießen (1948–1950, graduate farmer) and received his doctorate in 1956 at the University of Göttingen . From 1952 to 1958 he was a civil servant in the German Ministry of Agriculture . Von Verschuer took part in the German delegation between 1952 and 1954 in the negotiations for an agricultural union ("pool vert") in Western Europe and from 1956 to 1958 in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Rome .

In 1958 von Verschuer moved to Brussels as a European civil servant to the newly established General Directorate for Agriculture of the European Commission , where he retired 29 years later. From 1958 to 1967 he was assistant to the secretariat of the first general director for agriculture, Louis-Georges Rabot, and from 1967 to 1972 he was director responsible for international affairs and accession negotiations. From 1972 to 1986 he was Deputy Director General with the Directorates of Economy , Agricultural Structure and the Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund .

In 1979 he took over the Directorate “International Agricultural Affairs” and thus, among other things, the accession negotiations in the agricultural sector with Spain and Portugal and the opening of the Uruguay Round of the GATT . In 1987 he retired, but was still a special advisor for a year in the preparation of the first draft of the Commission document “The Future of Rural Areas”. Von Verschuer is the author of numerous papers on the common agricultural policy.

Like his parents, Von Verschuer was active in the Protestant church community and from 1942 onwards he participated in the officially forbidden community youth group with Pastor Herbert Mochalski in Berlin . In Brussels he later became president of the “Association œcuménique européenne pour église et société Bruxelles”. He is still living in Brussels after his retirement.

In the early 1980s, the geneticist Benno Müller-Hill , born in 1933, had a conversation with von Verschuer about his father, whose doctoral student and assistant Josef Mengele and his young family sometimes had tea with Mr. and Mrs. Verschuer. During the conversation, von Verschuer was largely ignorant of the collaboration between Otmar von Verschuer and Mengele, who had sent specimens from specially selected murdered concentration camp inmates from Auschwitz to its Berlin institute , for whose investigation Otmar von Verschuer had applied for DFG funding . Why Otmar von Verschuer destroyed the correspondence with Mengele after the end of the war, his father never spoke to him about it, but he was disappointed with the "slander" that he saw himself exposed to after the war by his former employees Hans Nachtsheim and Kurt Gottschaldt . Von Verschuer was also interviewed in 2002 by the German historian Carola Sachse and also by the American science historian Sheila Faith Weiss, who hoped to produce a biography about Otmar von Verschuer.

He is the father of the actor Leopold von Verschuer .

Fonts (selection)

  • Lectures, journal articles and articles in compilations on agricultural policy (library holdings see KVK)
  • The associated machine keeping in French agriculture . Göttingen, dissertation 1956
  • How I experienced the end of the war 60 years ago: letters, diary and memories . Printed as a manuscript. Nentershausen: H. v. Verschuer, 2004
  • How I got into agriculture and experienced the emergence of European agricultural policy: memories . Printed as a manuscript. Stadtroda, 2017

literature

  • Benno Müller-Hill : Deadly Science. The singling out of Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill 1933–1945 . Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984 pp. 127–130, conversation with Dr. Helmut v. Verschuer, son of Prof. Otmar v. Verschuer
  • Antoinette Panhuis (ed.): Rencontres: reflections on Europe, agriculture and the churches in honor of Helmut von Verschuer: Festschrift for the 65th birthday . Brussels: Association oecuménique pour église et société, 1991

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Europa.eu
  2. ↑ Sheila Faith Weiss: After the Fall. Political Whitewashing, Professional Posturing, and personal Refashioning in the Postwar Career of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer . In: Isis, Vol. 101 (2010), No. 4, pp. 722–758
    Michael Billig: About a Faustian pact , conversation with Sheila Faith Weiss, in: iley, July 15, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Verschuer, Helmut von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German European official
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Tübingen