Hermann Dietrich (politician, 1879)

Hermann Dietrich, 1930

Hermann Robert Dietrich (born December 14, 1879 in Oberprechtal ; † March 6, 1954 in Stuttgart ) was a politician of the German Democratic Party and a minister and vice chancellor in the Weimar Republic .

Life and work

After graduating from high school in Lörrach in 1897 , Dietrich studied law in Strasbourg , Basel , Göttingen and Heidelberg until 1901 . In Strasbourg he joined the Arminia Strasbourg fraternity and became its honorary chairman. After the subsequent legal clerkship, he was from 1905 City Councilor in Karlsruhe .

Hermann Dietrich was of Protestant faith. His estate is in the Koblenz Federal Archives .

Political party

During the empire Dietrich was a member of the National Liberal Party . In contrast to most of his party friends, he did not join the German People's Party in 1918 , but took part in the founding of the DDP . There he was considered the undisputed leader of the party in the state of Baden . After the DDP was renamed the “German State Party” after the Reichstag election in 1930 , Dietrich was elected its chairman.

After the Second World War he was a co-founder of the Democratic People's Party , which later became the state association of the FDP in Baden-Württemberg.

MP

Dietrich was a member of the Baden state parliament from 1911 to 1921. In 1919 he was elected as a member of the Weimar National Assembly, but resigned his mandate on April 12, 1919. In 1920 he returned to Reich politics when he was elected to the German Reichstag . He was a member of the Reichstag until July 1933 . Although, like Theodor Heuss , originally against the approval of the Enabling Act , he bowed to the majority of the other three state party members ( Ernst Lemmer , Reinhold Maier and Heinrich Landahl ) and approved the law in the Reichstag. Compared to critics such as B. Friedrich Ablass he justified this with the fact that it was important to protect the many state party members in the public service, who would have been dismissed immediately by the National Socialists if rejected .

Public offices

From 1908 to 1914 Dietrich was Mayor of Kehl , then Lord Mayor of Konstanz until 1919 .

Dietrich was Minister for Foreign Affairs in Baden from November 1918 to 1920. Between 1928 and 1932 he held various cabinet positions in the Weimar Republic . In the Müller II cabinet he was in charge of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture ; He continued this office in the following Briining I cabinet , then moved to the head of the Ministry of Finance , which he also headed in the second Briining cabinet . Under Heinrich Brüning he also served as Vice Chancellor (March 30, 1930 to May 30, 1932). As finance minister he was responsible for its deflationary policy , which led to considerable bitterness in parts of the DDP, especially in the more left-wing Hamburg regional association. After leaving the government, he worked as a lawyer.

At the beginning of February 1946 Dietrich became chairman of the coordination committee for balancing generation and consumption control in the French zone in Baden-Baden . From May 13, 1946 to March 31, 1947 he was Special Plenipotentiary for Food and Agriculture of the State Council of the American Occupation Area , and from September 24, 1946 until its dissolution on August 21, 1947, Director of the Administration Office for Food and Agriculture of the American and British Occupation Areas ; his deputy there was Hans Schlange-Schöningen . He was no longer a member of the successor office, the Administration for Food, Agriculture and Forestry of the United Economic Area (the predecessor of the Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Forestry ).

Honors

The Hermann Dietrich House on Tuebinger Gartenstrasse

Dietrich was awarded the Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1952 . According to him, are Hermann-Dietrich-Straße in Kehl and the Hermann-Dietrich House of Strasbourg fraternity Arminia Tubingen in the Garden Street in Tübingen named.

literature

• Karl Dietrich Bracher:  Dietrich, Hermann Robert. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 698 ( digitized version ).
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 1: A-E. Winter, Heidelberg 1996, ISBN 3-8253-0339-X , pp. 200-201.
• Jürgen Frölich : "He served the German people well". Hermann Dietrich's political path from the Baden national liberal to the Baden-Württemberg Free Democrat. In: Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 153 (2005), pp. 619–640.
• Desiderius Meier: Hermann Dietrich - citizen of the Weimar Republic . In: Yearbook for Liberalism Research 24 (2012), pp. 193–203.
• Adelheid von Saldern : Hermann Dietrich, a statesman of the Weimar Republic . Boldt, Boppard am Rhein 1966.
• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Dietrich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Hermann Dietrich in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Hermann Dietrich in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Hermann Dietrich in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Speeches by Hermann Dietrich in the Baden state parliament in the digital collections of the Badische Landesbibliothek

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hermann Dietrich's estate. Inventory NL 4 , edit. by Wolfgang Mommsen , Marianne Loenartz, Koblenz 1988 (= finding aids on the holdings of the Federal Archives , 34), ISBN 3-89192-013-X .
2. ^ Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953 . Munich 2007, p. 88 f.
3. ^ Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953 . Munich 2007, p. 73.
4. ^ ^{A b} Walter Vogel : West Germany 1945–1950 . Part 1 (=  publications of the Federal Archives . Volume 2 ). Koblenz 1989, ISBN 3-7646-1887-6 , p. 119 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed March 25, 2016]).
5. ^ Walter Vogel : West Germany 1945–1950 . Part 1 (=  publications of the Federal Archives . Volume 2 ). Koblenz 1989, ISBN 3-7646-1887-6 , p. 136 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed March 25, 2016]).
6. ^ Strasbourg fraternity Arminia zu Tübingen ( Memento from May 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).

predecessor	Office	successor
Franz Weber	Mayor of Konstanz 1914 - 1919	Otto Moericke