Johannes Hertel (politician)

Johannes Hertel , also Hans Hertel (born April 6, 1908 in Schweidnitz , † June 5, 1982 in Bremen ), was a German politician in the right-wing German Reich Party (DRP) and a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament .

Life

After attending the Schweidnitz preschool from 1914 to 1917 and the secondary school from 1917 to 1923, Hertel passed the examination for practical merchants in Königsberg in February 1928 . In April of the same year he passed the substitute maturity examination for business students. In May 1929 he passed the examination to become a business graduate and in July 1930 the examination to become a business teacher. From 1931 to 1938 he was an accountant at Koerner KG in Sandberg, Silesia. From 1938 to 1945 he was responsible for organization and balance sheets in the Berlin office of the Schwarz factory group.

From 1929 to 1934 Hertel was NSDAP district leader (membership number 99.305) in Waldenburg (Silesia) . In 1934 he moved to Berlin. According to his own information to the Reichsschrifttumskammer , Hertel had been a member of the SS since 1938 . From 1934 to 1945 he was a member of the DAF and from 1933 to 1945 of the NSV . He was also a member of the Reich Press Chamber and the Reich Association of the German Press and was a member of the German student body from 1926 to 1931 .

After military training from 1936 to 1938, war missions took place in 1939, 1940 and 1942; Hertel achieved at least the rank of lieutenant. At the end of the war, he was a company commander in the Volkssturm Battalion Wilhelmsplatz under Werner Naumann in the last fighting in Berlin's government district.

After the end of the war, Hertel worked for the Central Association of Expellees German , a forerunner of the Association of Expellees ; he also worked as a journalist. Later he worked as a commercial teacher at the municipal commercial college in Oldenburg.

In 1950 Hertel became a member of the Association of Expellees and Disenfranchised ; he is also assigned to the Naumann circle . In 1952 Hertel moved to DRP. After the Naumann circle was uncovered, he presented Naumann in the DRP party sheet Das Ziel as a “candidate not from a party”, but as a “non-partisan representative of national Germany in the fight against arbitrariness”. Naumann, whom Hertel already knew from his student days in Breslau, later ran for the DRP. In 1953 Hertel became a member of the DRP management; from 1954 he was the DRP state chairman for Lower Saxony. Under the influence of Hertel, who had already spoken out in favor of recognizing the GDR government at the end of 1954 , national neutralist positions gained in importance in the DRP .

On May 6, 1955, Hertel was elected to the Lower Saxony state parliament. On June 6, 1955, he resigned from his seat; Waldemar Schütz moved up for him . Also in 1955 he resigned as state chairman. The background to this was donation affairs: Donations personally received by Hertel had not been reported by the regional association to the federal party and thus remained in full with the regional association. In addition, Hertel had received a donation from a magazine during the election campaign that was financed by the GDR. Hertel remained a DRP member until 1964.

Between 1973 and 1975 Hertel was a functionary and speaker of the Stahlhelm - Kampfbund für Europa . In 1977 he founded an organization known as the German Popular Front , which set itself the goal of "defending against Bolshevism" and wanted to force the West German parties to give German reunification top priority through an "uprising from below" .

From 1973 Hertel was the author of the right-wing extremist magazine Mut . In addition, Hertel appeared as a speaker at events organized by the magazine, including in August 1977 at a so-called Kappler kidnapping ceremony and in 1975 at a readers' meeting. The indexing of a 1979 issue of Courage was justified, among other things, with Hertel's contribution "International Holocaust". Political scientist Katja Eddel calls Hertel “the defining author” of the magazine in the 1970s and assigns him to the “National Socialist spectrum within right-wing extremism”. According to Eddel, his contributions were characterized by Holocaust denial , racial hatred , glorification of National Socialism and contempt for human beings.

Hertel denied the existence of right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic and described himself as a staunch democrat.

literature

• 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. 158.
• Stephan A. Glienke: The Nazi past of a later member of the Lower Saxony state parliament . Final report on a project of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen on behalf of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Published by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Revised reprint of the first edition. Hannover 2012, p. 162f ( online as PDF) .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Manfred Jenke , Conspiracy from the right? A report on right-wing radicalism in Germany after 1945. Colloquium, Berlin 1961, p. 241.
2. ↑ Jenke, Conspiracy , pp. 164, 241.
3. ↑ Katja Eddel: The magazine MUT - a democratic opinion forum? Analysis and classification of a politically changed magazine . VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-18172-1 , p. 123.
4. ↑ Peter Dudek, Hans-Gerd Jaschke : Origin and development of right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1984, ISBN 3-531-11668-1 , p. 217.
5. ↑ Hans Frederik (Ed.): NPD. Danger from the right? Verlag Politisches Archiv, Munich-Inning 1966, pp. 130, 132.
6. ↑ Eddel, Zeitschrift Mut , p. 123f.
7. ^ Eddel, Zeitschrift Mut , pp. 105, 112.
8. ↑ Eddel, Zeitschrift Mut , p. 112f.
9. ↑ Eddel, Zeitschrift Mut , p. 127.
10. ↑ Eddel, Zeitschrift Mut , pp. 124, 126, 155, 165.
11. ↑ Eddel, Zeitschrift Mut , pp. 124f.