J. Hermann Siemer

Election poster by Hermann Siemer for the 1957 federal election

J. Hermann Siemer , also Hermann Siemer , actually Johannes Hermann Siemer , (born January 19, 1902 in Bergfeine (today a district of Damme ), † July 7, 1996 in Vechta ) was a German entrepreneur and politician of the CDU . He was a member of the Lower Saxony Landtag and the German Bundestag .

Life

Siemer's father Heinrich Siemer was a teacher at a one-class village school. Since he died in 1911, his mother had to go to Caroline. Bartel raise the six children who emerged from the marriage alone. After training in agriculture , Siemer studied business administration and law in Berlin, Lausanne and Paris. In 1927 he passed his commercial diploma and received his doctorate in 1930 at the Berlin School of Economics with a thesis on register lien . As a student, Siemer became a member of the Catholic student associations K.St.V. Guestphalia and K.St.V. Semnonia in KV . From 1929 Siemer was first managing director of the Berlin Polyphon publishing house, after which he worked in the textile industry in Berlin (fashion and textile house Hermann Siemer and textile factory “Siemer und Gerstendorf”). In 1938 he also took over the management of two farms belonging to a deceased childless uncle because of the provisions of the Reich Hereditary Farm Act. On the farm located in the village of Spreda near Langförden in the district of Vechta , in addition to cultivating the fields and growing fruit, he also ran a sweet cider factory since 1942. Siemer remained based in Berlin until 1945 and continued to manage his two textile companies there. The textile house was destroyed by bombs in 1945 and the textile factory, which was located in the Soviet sector, was expropriated.

In the Weimar Republic , Siemer was a member of the German Center Party , before its self-dissolution in July 1933, he became a member of the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 ( membership number 2,658,864). Siemer later stated that he had joined the party in 1933 at the insistence of his circle of friends from his student union, in particular Josef Wirmer , so that one could find out what was going on there and also to be able to exert influence. Siemer was just a simple member of the NSDAP and had no functions there. Because he employed Jews in his Berlin factories, he was briefly arrested by the Gestapo in 1933.

However, there was also a neighborhood dispute with the Jewish ophthalmologist Dr. Blumenthal on record, with whom Siemer lived in Berlin and about which he complained to the housing company in March 1937 and the latter threatened to report them because of the accommodation of the Jewish roommate: “Should [...] not take any decisive steps on this matter on your part will - by July 20, 37 - I will hand the matter over to both the party and the secret state police on the 21st . ” In addition, the threatening letter said: “ Of course I still reserve the right to object to the insolent behavior of Dr. Blumenthal to take further steps with the help of the state police. "

After July 20, 1944, Siemer was arrested again by the Gestapo because it was suspected that the Dominican priest Laurentius Siemer , who belonged to the Cologne district resistance group , was hiding with him . During this house search, several letters from Josef Wirmer, who had already been arrested, were found. Since these letters did not contain anything incriminating, the Gestapo released JHSiemer. Then Siemer even had the courage to first take in Wirmer's youngest son and, after his execution on September 8, 1944, his widow and two other children.

Before his execution, Josef Wirmer wrote to his friend JH Siemer on August 7, 1944: "Even the failed mission has its value in itself."

After the end of the Second World War , Siemer and former center politicians were among the co-founders of the Christian Democratic Party (CDP) in the state of Oldenburg on September 22, 1945 in Lohne . On November 19, 1945 he became chairman of the CDP district association Vechta. After the reorganization of the CDP into the CDU regional association in Oldenburg, Siemer was elected deputy regional chairman on March 11, 1946. He was a co-signer of the CDU program passed on March 1, 1946 , in which Konrad Adenauer had a significant share.

Siemer was 1945-1946 District of Vechta and 1946 deputy in the appointees Oldenburgische parliament and the municipal council of the then independent municipality Langförden that in 1974 a part of the town of Vechta was. In March 1946 he resigned his offices as district administrator and as a member of parliament in protest against the denazification provisions of the military government, which he regarded as "inappropriate and unjust ". In 1947/48 he was a member of the Zone Advisory Board of the British Zone of Occupation , where he was represented on the Finance Committee and the Housing Committee. He belonged to the Lower Saxony state parliament in the first electoral period from 1947 to 1951 and represented the constituency of Vechta there .

From 1953 to 1972 Siemer was a member of the German Bundestag . In 1957 and 1965 he was directly elected member of the Bundestag for the constituency of Delmenhorst - Wesermarsch and otherwise on the Lower Saxony state list. Siemer, who was considered a backbencher in the Bundestag , was not nominated again by his party in 1972. As a CDU member of the Bundestag, Siemer took a clear position against conscientious objectors - he compared them to “voles that we have to cut”.

In addition to his parliamentary activities, Siemer worked professionally as an entrepreneur, businessman and farmer , whereby he was also involved in professional politics, such as chairman of the Lower Saxony Association of the Lower Saxony Association . In 1961 he acquired the rights in Switzerland for a cold drying process for the pulverization of foodstuffs, which he wanted to implement as chairman of the supervisory board of Spreda Nahrungsmittelwerke AG , which he co-founded and based in Cloppenburg, with the capital of the wine distiller Ludwig Eckes . In 1963 the Spreda factory was built in the Emstekerfeld district of Cloppenburg; the 76 meter high "Spreda spray tower" built for the drying process later became a symbol of the city as the " Pfanni tower". Spreda AG did not achieve profitability in the production of quick meals such as kitchen-ready potato products and gave up production in 1965.

Afterlife

Siemers fruit juice company, which Dr. Siemer Getränke GmbH in Vechta-Langförden, now belongs to Valensina GmbH in Rheinberg after the takeover . In the production facility in Langförden-Spreda, fruit juices and fruit drinks are produced in cardboard packaging as well as cold aseptic PET bottles and are sold under the Dr. Siemer markets in the food trade . The company is also active in contract filling for other companies and private labels.

A public discussion began in 2008 about the Nazi past of (former) Lower Saxony state parliament members of the CDU, FDP and DP , stimulated by an initiative of the Lower Saxony parliamentary group of the Left and by a study commissioned by the Oldenburg contemporary historian Hans-Peter Klausch . The CDU state parliament members Siemer and Hans Watermann, who also represents the Vechta constituency, were also listed as NSDAP members, which was criticized in 2008/09 by the Oldenburgische Volkszeitung (OV), which was considered to be conservative . The OV had Professor Joachim Kuropka from the Vechta University of Applied Sciences , who described Klausch's study as “dubious, unfair and written exclusively from the perspective of the left”. Kuropka, who is active in the CDU district association Vechta and is a member of the state committee on education of the CDU in Lower Saxony, said, referring to Siemer and Watermann, among other things, that their "political stance was based on the Catholic-Christian image of man, on which they compared the new National Socialist Have retained values ​​". Klausch rejected the criticism and questioned the “carefully cultivated image of the Christian-motivated Nazi opponent Hermann Siemer”.

Honors

• 1972: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Publications

• Records and memories . In: German Bundestag, Scientific Services, Scientific Documentation Department (Ed.): Members of the German Bundestag. Records and memories. Volume 2 . Boldt, Boppard am Rhein 1983, ISBN 3-7646-1833-7 , pp. 285-312.

literature

• Art. Siemer, J. Hermann . In: Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 2: N-Z. Attachment. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , p. 821.
• CDU regional association Oldenburg (publisher): 60 years CDU regional association Oldenburg. A look back in pictures of life . Verlag Isensee, Oldenburg 2006, ISBN 3-89995-293-6 , p. 59ff.
• Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographical Lexicon of KV. 7th part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 9). Akadpress, Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-939413-12-7 , pp. 140 ff.
• W. Baumann in "Village and Family Chronicle Spreda": Village and Family Chronicle Spreda. Chronicle on the occasion of the 800th anniversary . Vechta-Spreda 2005, without ISBN.
• Barbara Simon : Member of Parliament in Lower Saxony 1946–1994. Biographical manual. Edited by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Lower Saxony State Parliament, Hanover 1996, p. 360.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Art. Siemer, J. Hermann . In: Rudolf Vierhaus, Ludolf Herbst (ed.): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Saur, Munich 2002, p. 821.
2. ↑ ^{a b} http://www.dielinke-cloppenburg.de/html/braune_wurzeln.html (link not available)
3. ↑ ^{a b} Quoted from: Hans-Peter Klausch : Letter to the editor on the articles "A 'dubious' view of 'brown roots'" and "... so as not to endanger the family's existence" in the OVZ of November 15, 2008 and 2. January 2009. (No longer available online.) Die Linke. District Association Cloppenburg, January 5, 2009, formerly in the original ; accessed on April 9, 2010 (letter to the editor to the Oldenburgische Volkszeitung (OV)).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
4. ↑ Call! ( PDF file; 2.1 MB) (No longer available online.) The Zone Committee of the Christian Democratic Union of the British Zone, Neheim-Hüsten, March 1, 1946, archived from the original on February 3, 2013 ; Retrieved April 9, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ ^{a b} Joachim Kuropka: "... so as not to endanger the family's existence". ( PDF file) Oldenburgische Volkszeitung , January 2, 2009, accessed on April 9, 2010 . 
6. ↑ Federal Archives / Institute for Contemporary History (Eds.), Walter Vogel / Christoph Weisz (Ed.): Files on the Prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1949, Volume 1, September 1945– December 1946 . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-486-52641-3 , pp. 612-614.
7. ↑ Bernd Rosema: Election campaign in the province. Lumpi to Bonn . In: Die Zeit , No. 46/1972
8. ↑ Second class . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 1970, pp. 36-49 ( online ).
9. ↑ Kurt Pritzkoleit: The new gentlemen. The powerful in state and economy . Verlag K. Desch, Munich 1955, without ISBN, p. 212.
10. ↑ Ludwig Eckes: Powder and porridge . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1965, pp. 61-62 ( online ).
11. ↑ Internet presence of Valensina GmbH → Dr. Siemer
12. ↑ Hans-Peter Klausch : Brown Roots - Old Nazis in the parliamentary groups of the CDU, FDP and DP. ( PDF file; 1.8 MB) The Left. Parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony State Parliament, pp. 3–4 , accessed on April 9, 2010 (brochure, digitally available free of charge online).