Hermann Becker (politician, 1905)

Hermann Becker (born April 8, 1905 in Plauen ; † August 18, 1981 in West Berlin ) was a German banker , politician ( LDPD ), editor of the Thuringian newspaper and a victim of Stalinism .

Life

Hermann Becker was the son of the businessman Benno Becker and his wife Ottilie, née Möller. From 1911 he attended the higher middle school in Plauen. After his father died in 1913, he moved to Kassel in 1914 , where he attended secondary school II from 1915. He broke off a commercial apprenticeship started in 1922 in favor of a bank apprenticeship at Commerz- und Privat-Bank AG . After graduating, he went to Göttingen as a student trainee in 1925 and to Berlin in 1926 , where, in addition to attending university, he also attended lectures at the Political College . Due to the difficult economic situation, he had to break off his studies in economics and philosophy at the end of 1926 and from 1927 worked at Commerzbank in Saalfeld / Saale .

At the beginning of 1929 he moved to the Deutsche Verkehrs-Kreditbank in Erfurt . In Erfurt he began to be politically active and joined the Radical Democratic Party , for which he ran unsuccessfully for the Reichstag in 1932 . With the beginning of the Nazi era , he withdrew from political life after being briefly imprisoned in 1933. Becker married Charlotte Bode in 1935, a daughter was born to the couple in 1936 and a son in 1941. From 1939 to 1943 Becker managed the bank branch in Erfurt, then his UK position was canceled. He was sent to Hersfeld as a soldier , where he - temporarily ill - was stationed until the US Army took the place in early April 1945.

Political activity

Hermann Becker made his way to Erfurt at the end of the war in 1945, where he participated in representing the German population vis-à-vis the Americans. After the occupation of Thuringia by the Red Army in 1945, he was one of the founders of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Erfurt and its state and zone association. In autumn 1945, Hermann Becker and other publishers founded the Thüringische Landeszeitung . He organized the first all-German LDP party congress in Erfurt in 1946. Becker was on the board of the LDP zone association and on the entire board of the LDP-FDP in Germany. "With my political activity I represented the German population vis-à-vis the SMAD and, increasingly, also against the SED that it launched ". In 1946 he was elected to the Thuringian state parliament and chairman of the LDP parliamentary group. Becker repeatedly advocated adherence to the rule of law in parliamentary speeches and called for the LDP to be more involved in the development work. The LDP turned against the arbitrary expropriation of private companies practiced in the Soviet Zone and demanded the same economic conditions for them.

In 1948, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) intervened in the LDP's personnel policy. Before the state party conference in July 1948, SMAD tried to persuade Hermann Becker to withdraw from the state executive. Becker, who was also very popular outside his party, gave in to the delegates of the party congress and was elected by them as the second deputy party chairman. A few days after the party congress, he had a speech by the philosophy professor Hans Leisegang printed as an editorial in the Thuringian newspaper , in which he called for equal study of all religions and worldviews.

After Alphons Gaertner , who was designated by the SMAD as the central LDP chairman of the SBZ, had escaped , Hermann Becker was arrested by members of the NKVD a few days later on July 23, 1948 - despite guaranteed immunity - during a break in the Thuringian state parliament in Weimar . After two years of imprisonment, mostly solitary confinement in the NKVD prison in Hohenschönhausen , Becker was sentenced to 25 years of forced labor from Moscow in 1950 on charges of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda and espionage, among other things. He was sent to a labor camp near Vorkuta in early August 1950 , where he was forced to stay for four years. After brief stays in two other camps, Becker was given amnesty after visiting Adenau in the Soviet Union and released to West Berlin in October 1955. For over 7 years he had no contact with the family in Erfurt, who then followed him to West Berlin. “He returned sick and mentally exhausted”.

At the end of 1956, Becker became managing director of the research advisory board for questions relating to the reunification of the Federal Ministry for all German questions. This scientist had to continuously analyze the situation in the GDR in the event of reunification (day X). Becker was also a member of the Board of Trustees Indivisible Germany and State Representative for Berlin in the Königsteiner Kreis . Becker became increasingly desperate about the political situation, especially after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. After his return to Germany he remained non-party. In particular, because of his experiences, he rejected the “new Ostpolitik” of the FDP. Becker retired in 1971 and the Research Advisory Board was dissolved in 1975. He spent his last years studying private German Ostpolitik. Hermann Becker died in West Berlin at the age of 76.

Appreciation

In November 1993, Becker was rehabilitated by the Russian Supreme Court: "It was recognized that he had been accused of espionage and that his imprisonment was due to unfounded political motives." With paragraph 3 of the Russian Federation Law on "Rehabilitation of Victims." political reprisals ”on October 18, 1991, he was rehabilitated.

The FDP parliamentary group paid tribute to Hermann Becker in the presence of his wife, daughter and son, in 1993 on the sidelines of the constituent assembly of the Thuringian state parliament on the Wartburg in Eisenach.

Efforts since the beginning of the 1990s to name a street in Erfurt after Hermann Becker have been unsuccessful.

In August 2009, the then President of the Thuringian State Parliament, Dagmar Schipanski, unveiled a plaque on the wall opposite the Ricarda-Huch slogan in the foyer of the parliamentary group building with the words: "The Thuringian State Parliament commemorates all the persecuted politicians of the State of Thuringia 1945-1952", among them the following three politicians are named and portrayed: Hermann Becker (LDP), Hermann Brill (SPD) and Hugo Dornhofer (CDU).

On July 23, 2013, on the 65th anniversary of Hermann Becker's arrest, the FDP parliamentary group solemnly named its meeting room in the Thuringian state parliament in Erfurt “Hermann Becker Hall”. After the FDP left the state parliament in autumn 2014, the AfD faction took over the room and kept its name and appreciation with a mural and a short text.

literature

• Arrested from lunch and deported to Siberia. Banker, newspaper publisher and party founder in Erfurt - city wants to name a street after him. In: Erfurter Wochenblatt. April 6, 1995.
• Lutz Becker (son of Hermann Becker): Short biography of Hermann Becker . Early 1990s, Erfurt City Archives.
• Hermann Becker brochure for the 4th Ordinary State Party Congress of the FDP Thuringia, 1994.
• Jürgen Louis: Hermann Becker. In: Karl Wilhelm Fricke , Peter Steinbach , Johannes Tuchel (eds.): Opposition and resistance in the GDR. Political images of life . (= Beck series. 1479). CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47619-8 , p. 38ff.

Web links

• Hermann Becker's curriculum vitae on the Friedrich Naumann Foundation website ( PDF ; 1.30 MB)
• Hermann Becker on Politics for Freedom

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jochen Lengemann . Thuringian state parliaments 1919–1952 . Böhlau Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-412-22179-9 .
2. ^ Copy in the Erfurt City Archives
3. ↑ TLZ editor honored for resistance. FDP commemorates Thuringian victims of Stalinism. In: Thüringische Landeszeitung / Erfurter Tagespost. October 26, 1993.
4. ↑ Landtag honored Hermann Becker. In: Erfurter Wochenblatt. October 28, 1993.
5. ↑ Co-founder of the TLZ is honored in the state parliament. Hall bears Hermann Becker's name. In: Thüringische Landeszeitung. 22. July 2013.