Herbert Czaja

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Herbert Czaja's candidate poster for the 1976 federal election

Herbert Helmut Czaja (born November 5, 1914 in Teschen ; † April 18, 1997 in Stuttgart ) was a German CDU politician . From 1970 to 1994 he was President of the Association of Expellees .

education and profession

Czaja was born into a Catholic family in Teschen who were fluent in bilingualism and who took citizenship of Poland after 1918. After graduating from the German high school in Bielitz , the capital of the Bielitz-Biala language island , Czaja studied German , history and philosophy in Krakow and Vienna from 1933 to 1938 . He then worked as a teacher in the secondary school service and worked as a professor at the grammar school in Mielec and finally as a research assistant at the University of Krakow . In 1937/38 he belonged to the German Association for the National Pacification of Europe , which his former teacher, the well-known Hitler opponent Senator Eduard Pant , had founded. In 1939 in Krakow he also obtained his doctorate degree. phil. After the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland , he refused to join the NSDAP . This led to the loss of his assistant position. From 1940 he worked as a high school teacher in Zakopane and Przemyśl . In 1942 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and seriously wounded on the Eastern Front .

After the expulsion , he worked in high school in Stuttgart from 1946, most recently as a teacher.

family

Herbert Czaja was married to Eva-Maria Reinhardt (born November 29, 1926 in Stuttgart, † June 28, 2006 ibid), Rudolf Reinhardt's sister , and had nine children. His eldest daughter Christine, who has been the deputy chairwoman of the Oberschlesier Landsmannschaft for many years , published biographical articles about him in 2003.

Political party

Czaja comes from a Roman Catholic family and has been a member of the German Christian People's Party Eduard Pants since 1933 . Czaja was involved in popular politics in German student associations in both Krakow and Vienna.

After the war, Czaja became a member of the Junge Union and the CDU. Here he was also one of the co-founders of the Union of Expellees in the CDU , whose state chairman for North Württemberg he became in 1952.

MP

From 1947 to 1953 Czaja was a member of the Stuttgart city council.

From 1953 to 1990 Czaja was a member of the German Bundestag . From 1980 to 1990 he was chairman of the group of refugees and displaced persons in the CDU / CSU parliamentary group .

Herbert Czaja entered the German Bundestag as a directly elected member of the Stuttgart II constituency from the 2nd to the 9th electoral term via the Baden-Württemberg state list and in the 10th and 11th electoral terms.

In contrast to the large majority of members of the Bundestag from all parties, Czaja considered the reunification of Germany through the unification of the Federal Republic and GDR to be incomplete because the formerly German eastern territories were not included. In the unification process, he therefore voted several times against the majority of his own parliamentary group, including against the joint resolution on the German-Polish border , against the unification treaty and against the two-plus-four treaty .

In September 1990 he also tried, together with other parliamentary group colleagues, in vain to prevent the Bundestag from discussing the Unification Treaty by means of an application for an interim order at the Federal Constitutional Court . The application was rejected as "manifestly unfounded".

Even after German reunification and his resignation from the Bundestag in 1990, Czaja continued his political course relentlessly and made even more radical demands. In his thousand-page book On the Way to Smallest Germany? In 1996 he demanded a restoration of the German Reich within the borders of 1937 , which “by no means have to be the end point”. The political scientist Ernst-Otto Czempiel then described him in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a “conspiracy theorist” and “political wrongdoer”, for whom “the term revisionism is far too harmless”. On the other hand, more recent historical studies indicate that, despite his resistance to the social-liberal Ostpolitik, as early as the late 1960s, out of a “genuine Christian willingness to reconcile”, he developed alternatives to the nation-state revision policy, which “a new beginning on the basis of equal cooperation and a fair balance of opposites ”.

Social offices

Czaja was a founding member of the auxiliary Federation of Expellees in Stuttgart and also belonged to the circle Refugee Committee to. He was a co-founder of the new home association for expellees and was a member of the board of directors of the Ackermann community .

Since 1948 Czaja was an elected member of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK).

Herbert Czaja had been the spokesman for the Oberschlesier Landsmannschaft since 1969 and president of the Association of Expellees from 1970 to 1994 . He took over this office during the new Ostpolitik of the social-liberal coalition. Czaja was u. a. involved in developing alternatives to the German-Polish textbook recommendations, which he published in a documentation in 1980.

In addition, from 1974 until his death in 1997 he was chairman of the board of trustees of the Cultural Foundation for German Expellees .

Honors

Herbert Czaja received the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968 , the Great Cross of Merit in 1973 and the Great Cross of Merit with a Star in 1984, and on May 7, 1988 the Medal of Merit of the State of Baden-Württemberg . In 1989 he was honored with the Prussian shield. In 2002 the Dr.-Herbert-Czaja-Weg in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen was named after him.

Publications

  • Compensation with Eastern Europe. Attempt for a European peace order. Seewald, Stuttgart 1969.
  • Materials on Oder-Neisse questions. Documentation on the legal situation of Germany and the Germans according to international law and the Basic Law with special consideration of the areas east of the Oder and Neisse (= series of publications of the Cultural Foundation of German Expellees. Vol. 9). Cultural Foundation of the German Displaced Persons, Bonn 1979 (annotated documentation).
  • Our moral duty. Life for Germany. Edited by Hartmut Koschyk . Langen Müller, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7844-2279-9 (collection of speeches and essays).
  • On the way to the smallest Germany? Lack of solidarity with the displaced. Marginalia on 50 years of Ostpolitik. Knecht, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-7820-0730-1 .

literature

  • Christine Maria Czaja (Ed.): Herbert Czaja. Human rights lawyer. Cultural Foundation of German Expellees, Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-88557-210-9 .
  • Sebastian Rosenbaum: Operation “Poseł”. Herbert Czaja in the sights of the Polish security service. In: ZS Confinium. Contributions to Upper Silesian history. Vol. 3, 2008, ZDB -ID 2275328-X , pp. 173-196.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Pamphlet for the German Reich , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 20, 1996
  2. ^ Mathias Stickler: "East German means all German." Organization, self-image and political objectives of the German expellee associations 1949-1972. Düsseldorf 2004, p. 396f.
  3. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 25, No. 159, August 25, 1973.
  4. ↑ List of medal recipients 1975–2019. (PDF; 180 kB) State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg, p. 29 , accessed on June 12, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Czaja, Herbert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Czaja, Herbert Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), Member of the Bundestag
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Teschen , today Cieszyn
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1997
Place of death Stuttgart