Hermann Höpker-Aschoff

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Hermann Höpker-Aschoff (1951)

Hermann Höpker-Aschoff (born January 31, 1883 in Herford ; † January 15, 1954 in Karlsruhe ) was a German politician ( DDP or DStP , later FDP ). Höpker-Aschoff was Prussian Finance Minister from 1925 to 1931 . In the founding phase of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948 and 1949 he was a member of the Parliamentary Council , from 1949 to 1951 a member of the German Bundestag and from 1951 to 1954 first President of the Federal Constitutional Court, founded on September 28, 1951 .

Life

Höpker-Aschoff comes from the Westphalian bourgeoisie . The father, Ernst Höpker-Aschoff, was a pharmacist, councilor and registrar. The mother, Helene Luise (née Quantity), was the daughter of a businessman. The parental home was marked by strict Protestantism and a national liberal political stance. After graduating from high school, Hermann Höpker-Aschoff studied law and economics in Jena , Munich and Bonn at the humanistic Friedrichs-Gymnasium . In 1901 in Jena he became a member of the Arminia fraternity in the castle cellar . In 1907 he was promoted to Dr. jur. doctorate, followed three years later by the assessor examination. Then he joined the Prussian judicial service. He worked at the local courts in Vlotho and Höxter . During the First World War he served as a reserve officer in an artillery regiment. Later he was a district judge in Bochum and from 1921 a higher regional judge in Hamm .

Hermann Höpker-Aschoff was married to Margarete Höpker-Aschoff.

Weimar Republic

In the Weimar Republic , Höpker-Aschoff was a member of the DDP (from July 13, 1930: German State Party). In the state elections on February 20, 1921, he was elected to the Prussian state parliament for a Westphalian constituency , to which he belonged until 1932. From 1930 to 1932 he was also a member of the Reichstag .

In connection with the candidacy of Wilhelm Marx and Otto Braun for the office of Reich President , Höpker-Aschoff was even elected Prussian Prime Minister on March 31, 1925 with 211 out of 430 votes. However, he rejected the election on April 2. Instead, he took over the Prussian Ministry of Finance under Adam Stegerwald and Otto Braun. He already held this position in Wilhelm Marx's interim cabinet in February 1925. He stayed in office until 1931. Although there were political conflicts, Otto Braun treated him with aloof respect. Höpker-Aschoff managed to keep the country's budget in balance. Because he often opposed the spending requests of the other ministers, he made himself unpopular with the leaders of the big government factions.

He was responsible for the conclusion of the contract between the Prussian state and the House of Hohenzollern to regulate open property issues. Ultimately, the criticism led to the referendum on the expropriation of the princes in 1926.

The office of finance minister has strongly shaped his political views. He was convinced of the need for a comprehensive financial reform of the Reich . In addition to Erich Koch-Weser , he was most committed to a so-called imperial reform from the DDP camp . With Prime Minister Otto Braun and Minister of Education Carl Heinrich Becker, he played a key role in the negotiations with the Vatican on the Prussian Concordat of June 14, 1929.

In the years 1929/31, marked by the beginning of the global economic crisis , he played a leading role in the development of political liberalism . He was instrumental in the merger of the DDP with the National People's Association and the Young German Order to form the German State Party. This merger, however, proved to be unsuccessful.

Following his Unitarian conviction, Höpker-Aschoff spoke out in favor of a “pact between Braun and Brüning ” in the final phase of Weimar , because he was convinced that this was the only way to overcome the crisis. In order to overcome the weaknesses of the previous parliamentary system, he called for an “authoritative government on a parliamentary basis.” The government should continue to rely on a parliamentary majority, but at the same time be more than an “executive committee of parliament.” Specifically, he planned that the Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun should join the Reich Cabinet as a minister without portfolio. Carl Severing was also to become Minister of the Interior in personal union . However, he refused Brüning's plan to make him Reich Finance Minister in personal union . Even if Otto Braun and Brüning showed interest in the plan, it failed not least because of the opposition from Kurt von Schleicher , who feared an expansion of the government to the left .

The failure of these efforts contributed significantly to the resignation and withdrawal from politics in 1931. The real reason was that he had come into conflict with other government ministers and civil servants' associations because of the public service cuts he had planned. In the last years of the republic he expressed himself skeptical about the parliamentary-democratic system of government . After the so-called Prussian strike, he negotiated unsuccessfully on behalf of the deposed state government with the Reich government to restore constitutional order .

After the Reich acquired the majority of shares in Dresdner Bank in 1932, Höpker-Aschoff was elected to the supervisory board as one of the Reich’s representatives. At times he was deputy chairman of the supervisory board.

time of the nationalsocialism

After 1933 Höpker-Aschoff initially lived in Bielefeld without permanent professional activity . His political stance was contradicting itself. During this time he worked on various scientific publications. In 1936 he published Our Way Through Time . In it he tried to achieve a synthesis of National Socialism and the rule of law . However, the writing also contained hidden criticism of the regime. This led to the confiscation and confiscation of the writing. He also worked on the magazine Die Hilfe, once headed by Friedrich Naumann and now Theodor Heuss . Heuss described him as the most important people in the political arena by 1935. Already the October issue of 1934 fell because of an article of Höpker-Aschoff into the sights of the authorities because his article "Democracy and leadership" as a positive representation of the political system in the UK are understood could.

Under the impression of John Maynard Keynes among others, he revised his previous financial policy views. He published Money and Gold in 1939 . After the Second World War in 1949/50, this work earned him financial science teaching positions and an honorary professorship in Münster and Bonn .

At the beginning of the Second World War , Höpker-Aschoff was conscripted. From 1940 he was chief lawyer and head of department VI (later also department V) of the main trust agency east . This authority was responsible for the confiscation, administration and distribution of confiscated property of Polish citizens and Eastern European Jews in the areas annexed to the German Reich (so-called "annexed eastern areas"). As chief lawyer, he was directly involved in the National Socialist extermination and expulsion policy in the Eastern European occupied territories and was involved in their legal legitimation. In 1944 there were conflicts with Martin Bormann because Höpker-Aschoff wanted to exempt the stolen church property from expropriation. He was then transferred. He experienced the end of the war in Wernigerode .

post war period

At the suggestion of the British occupation authorities, Höpker-Aschoff took over the position of general advisor for finances at the Westphalian provincial administration in 1945 under President Rudolf Amelunxen . On the other hand, because of Höpker-Aschoff's earlier work in Poland, a protest immediately arose from the Polish side, without Amelunxen taking this into account. He was a strict opponent of the unification of the province of Westphalia with parts of the Rhine province and instead advocated a north-widened Westphalia as a separate country.

Höpker-Aschoff was one of the founders of the FDP in East Westphalia and was a member of the party's federal executive committee from 1948 to 1950. At Amelunxen's request, he was appointed finance minister in 1946 as a member of the first cabinet of North Rhine-Westphalia. This appointment failed because of his work during the war due to objections from the British occupation authorities.

From September 1948 Höpker-Aschoff was a member of the Parliamentary Council . As a convinced centralist, he decisively shaped the financial constitution of the Basic Law (Section X). In particular, the creation of the strong federal position in the financial sector and the independence of the Bundesbank from directives from politics are ascribed to him.

In the federal election in 1949 , he ran for the FDP and was elected to parliament on their North Rhine-Westphalian state list. There he was chairman of the finance and tax committee until 1951.

On September 7, 1951, Höpker-Aschoff became the first President of the Federal Constitutional Court, whereupon he resigned from the Bundestag. At the same time he was chairman of the first senate. He held this office until his death in 1954. Under his chairmanship, the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court issued a ban on the SRP in 1952 . On the other hand, he was an opponent of the KPD ban , so the process only really got going after his death. He is buried in Herford.

Honors

Höpker-Aschoff was an honorary citizen of his hometown Herford. On January 19, 1954, the Bundestag honored him with a state act.

Publications

  • Money and gold. G. Fischer, Jena 1939.
  • Money and currencies. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1948.

literature

  • Günther Grünthal :  Höpker-Aschoff, Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 349 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Erhard HM Lange: Hermann Höpker-Aschoff. In: Land und Bund. Cologne 1981, pp. 210-254.
  • Erhard HM Lange: A life in the service of the state. On the 30th anniversary of Hermann Höpker-Aschoff's death. In: liberal , 25 (1983), pp. 946-951.
  • Theodor Ritterspach : Hermann Höpker-Aschoff. The first President of the Federal Constitutional Court. In: Yearbook of the Public Law of the Present , New Series 32 (1983), pp. 55–62.
  • Thomas Aders : The utopia of the state over the parties. Biographical approaches to Hermann Höpker-Aschoff (1883–1954). Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1994.
  • Frank Spieker: Hermann Höpker-Aschoff. Father of the financial constitution. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-428-11173-7 .
  • Munzinger: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 11/1954 from March 8, 1954, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 23/2004.
  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 2: F-H. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0809-X , pp. 355-357.
  • Martin Will: Ephoral Constitution. The party ban of the right-wing extremist SRP from 1952, Thomas Dehlers Rosenburg and the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-16-155893-1 (biography of Höpker Aschoff on pp. 240–243).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Hanow: History of the Burgkellerburschenschaft Arminia on the Burgkeller during the years 1859-1932 , Hildesheim 1933, p. 331.
  2. ^ Prussia events 1918–1933 .
  3. ^ Theo Ritterspach: Hermann Höpker-Aschoff. The first President of the Federal Constitutional Court . In: Yearbook of Public Law . Vol. 32, 1983, p. 57.
  4. ^ Wilhelm Ribhegge : Prussia in the west. Struggle for parliamentarism in Rhineland and Westphalia . Münster 2008 (special edition for the state center for political education in North Rhine-Westphalia ), p. 408.
  5. ^ Wilhelm Ribhegge: Prussia in the west. Struggle for parliamentarism in Rhineland and Westphalia . Münster 2008 (special edition for the state center for political education NRW), p. 445.
  6. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The way into the disaster. Workers and the labor movement in the Weimar Republic 1930 to 1933 , Bonn 1990, p. 160, p. 397.
  7. ^ Theo Ritterspach: Hermann Höpker-Aschoff. The first President of the Federal Constitutional Court . In: Yearbook of Public Law . Vol. 32, 1983, p. 58.
  8. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke (Ed.): The Dresdner Bank in the Third Reich. Munich 2006, p. 83.
  9. ↑ Short biography Federal Agency for Civic Education (PDF).
  10. ↑ Munzinger: Internationales Biographisches Archiv , 11/1954 of March 8, 1954, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 23/2004.
  11. ↑ Reiner Burger: Theodor Heuss as a journalist. Observer and interpreter of four epochs of German history . Münster 1999, p. 313.
  12. ↑ Elke Seefried (arrangement): Theodor Heuss. On the defensive. Letters 1933–1945. Munich 2009, p. 252.
  13. ^ Wilhelm Ribhegge: Prussia in the west. Struggle for parliamentarism in Rhineland and Westphalia . Münster 2008 (special edition for the state center for political education in North Rhine-Westphalia), p. 609.
  14. ^ Bernd Haunfelder : North Rhine-Westphalia. Country and people 1946–2006. A biographical manual . Münster 2006, p. 218 f.
  15. ^ Wilhelm Ribhegge: Prussia in the west. Struggle for parliamentarism in Rhineland and Westphalia . Münster 2008 (special edition for the state center for political education in North Rhine-Westphalia), p. 615.
  16. ^ Wilhelm Ribhegge: Prussia in the west. Struggle for parliamentarism in Rhineland and Westphalia. Münster 2008 (special edition for the state center for political education NRW), p. 650.
  17. ↑ Thorsten Jungholt: Judges and robbers . In: Die Welt , May 10, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Höpker-Aschoff, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (DDP, DStP, FDP), MdR, MdB and President of the Federal Constitutional Court
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Herford
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1954
Place of death Karlsruhe