Julius Curtius

Julius Curtius, 1920

Julius Curtius (left) with Gustav Stresemann (1929)

Julius Curtius (born February 7, 1877 in Duisburg , † November 10, 1948 in Heidelberg ) was a German lawyer and politician ( DVP ). He worked as Reich Economics Minister and Reich Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic .

Family and studies

Julius Curtius came from a family of manufacturers in the area of ​​the Duisburg harbor , which Latinized its name from Korte to Curtius in the 18th century . His father Friedrich Curtius (1850–1904), who owned factories for ultramarine and alums in Duisburg and Eichelkamp , was married to Adele Brockhoff (* 1857). His uncle was the well-known chemist Theodor Curtius .

From 1885 to 1895 he attended grammar school in Duisburg. He then studied law in Bonn , Kiel and Strasbourg until 1898 . In December 1898 he passed the state examination, 1900 he was in Berlin with a dissertation on the Legal Status of Complementary Dr. jur. PhD . From March 1899 to May 1905 he worked in the Prussian judicial service in Berlin, Hamm , Kiel and Duisburg , and from 1900 to 1901 he spent ten months studying in Paris. He passed the assessor examination at the beginning of 1905.

Curtius with his family, photo from 1930

In the same year he married Adda Carp, the daughter of the business lawyer Eduard Carp. His daughter Barbara (* July 7, 1908; † April 1, 2006) was married to the resistance fighter Hans Bernd von Haeften . Through his mother-in-law, he established relationships with the family of the industrialists Haniel . At their Gutehoffnungshütte AG he later held a position on the supervisory board. Since he was now financially very well secured and, on the other hand, the legal state service was not suitable for him, he took up an activity as a lawyer in Duisburg on October 2, 1905. In 1910 his son Wolfgang was born, who was later also connected to the Haniel family as an entrepreneur. In 1911 the family moved to Heidelberg, where Julius Curtius devoted himself entirely to his studies in political science , whereby constitutional issues were of great importance to him. He also began to publish in this field. During the First World War he led a battery as a reserve officer with the rank of captain of the infantry .

Entry into the German People's Party

Since he was close to the National Liberals due to his family background, he founded a local branch of the German People's Party (DVP) in Heidelberg in 1919 and took over its chairmanship. In this position he ran for the Heidelberg City Council, which he belonged from May 25, 1919 to October 31, 1921 as parliamentary group leader. From 1919 he was also a member of the board of directors of the Reichszentrale and the executive committee of the DVP until 1932.

His studies prompted him to submit a statement to the Baden National Assembly in January 1919, in which he advocated the participation of the population in legislation and the formation of a constitution. The constitutional commission in Baden took up these proposals and worked them into the draft for a constitution. The core idea of ​​his proposals was that referendums should be used by the people to vote on questions of health, peace, order, security and budgetary legislation. This idea of ​​the referendum was incorporated into the later imperial constitution. However, he later took a distant view of this concrete implementation of his ideas.

Mandate in the Reichstag

Curtius belonged to the right wing of the DVP and in March 1920 even supported the Kapp Putsch . In June 1920 he ran in constituency 35 for the DVP for the Reichstag and won the mandate that he represented until May 1924. In the Reichstag parliamentary group, he consistently opposed participation of the DVP in the Reich government as long as the SPD was represented in it. Since he also represented positions in heavy industry, he developed into the political opponent of Gustav Stresemann . After the Hitler putsch , in a cautious statement at the DVP party congress in November 1923, he suggested that Stresemann resign from the position of party chairman.

Economics Minister in the Reich Government

Curtius had meanwhile moved to Berlin at the beginning of November 1921 and had settled there as a lawyer, where he worked at the higher court. Within the DVP and in the Reichstag committees, he gained a good reputation as a specialist in questions of economy and constitutional law. So he appeared as a reporter for the respective committee in the Reichstag and in 1924 was able to rise to the position of deputy chairman of the Reichstag faction of the DVP. In the same year, his mandate in the Reichstag for the Baden constituency 32 was confirmed, which he held until September 1930.

The DVP nominated him at the beginning of 1926 as Reich Economics Minister under Chancellor Hans Luther , and he was appointed on January 19. In his new office he was concerned with the problems of reparations . He also worked on the job creation program, with the Reichsbahn commissioning heavy industry. He wanted to promote the export of goods through export credits and subsidies. He also campaigned for delivery business to the Soviet Union.

Foreign Minister in the Reich Government

On January 10, 1927, the Reich President instructed him to reorganize the Reich government, since the government of Wilhelm Marx had been overthrown in December 1926. But Curtius was unsuccessful. After difficult negotiations, a new government was formed on January 28, 1927, in which Curtius continued to hold the office of Minister of Economics. He also held this office in the following governments until 1929. When Stresemann died on October 3, 1929, Curtius was temporarily entrusted with the administration of the Reich Foreign Minister on the following day and was appointed Foreign Minister on November 8, 1929.

During his term of office he said goodbye to the understanding-oriented Locarno policy of his predecessor Gustav Stresemann and the transition to a clearer revision policy aimed at a confrontation with France. However, he never exerted any great influence on foreign policy, since Chancellor Heinrich Brüning reserved the most important decisions and, above all, the important reparations policy for himself.

With little skill he initiated the attempt to form a customs union between Austria and Germany , with which the ban on joining the Versailles Treaty should be circumvented. Before Curtius took the first steps in this matter, however, he briefed Chancellor Brüning. Both voted that in case of failure, Curtius would assume full political responsibility alone. Thus, the consequences remained controllable. Only Curtius was asked to resign should the project fail, but not the Chancellor. This only stand-alone initiative of his tenure did in fact provoke international disapproval and was officially rejected by the permanent International Court of Justice. As a result, he had to resign from his post as foreign minister on October 3, 1931.

The British ambassador Horace Rumbold wrote in a report to the Foreign Office on the occasion of Curtius' resignation that he had "neither [...] had the broad horizon nor the political genius of his predecessor", but that he was "pleasant" in interpersonal relationships. Curtius' colleague Ernst von Weizsäcker describes him in his diary as “wooden”, “somewhat unimaginative” and “a little naive”. In his memoirs, his interpreter Paul Schmidt especially remembers Curtius' “somewhat cool aloofness, which made close, personal contact with his foreign interlocutors difficult” and the kind of lawyer with whom he had diplomatic talks .

Exclusion from the German People's Party

The following year, the conservative-liberal-minded Curtius was expelled from the right-wing extremist faction in February 1932 because of internal party differences and personal aversions and switched to the German State Party . As a lawyer, he represented the interests of his client Heinrich von Pless vis-à-vis Poland. But here, too, he was unsuccessful, since in the autumn of 1933 the Reich government did not want to promote any tensions with Poland and forced Curtius to withdraw.

End of war and post-war period

Julius Curtius grave in the Heidelberg mountain cemetery

From 1932 to 1936 Curtius worked in Berlin as an asset manager and then again as a lawyer until 1943. He also managed his country estate in Grammertin near Wokuhl in Mecklenburg-Strelitz , where he owned 1,450 acres of land. The SS Security Service (SD) reported on him in 1939 that he had an annual income of 44,256 RM and managed assets of around 1,648,000 RM. Furthermore, he received a pension of 16,075 RM per year from the legation fund of the Foreign Office.

Curtius was expropriated in October 1945. He moved to the West and settled in Heidelberg. Curtius worked as a lawyer in Heidelberg and West Berlin in the following years. He found his final resting place in the Bergfriedhof in Heidelberg.

Fonts

• About the introduction of popular initiatives and referendums in the new constitutions of the German states. Heidelberg 1919.
• Bismarck's plan for a German economics council. Heidelberg 1919.
• What was achieved in the Hague. Berlin 1929.
• Internal consolidation and ability to act in foreign policy. Berlin 1930.
• Germany and the Polish Corridor. Berlin 1933.
• Efforts for Austria. The failure of the customs union plan of 1931. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1947.
• Minister of the German Republic for six years. Carl Winter University Press, Heidelberg 1948.
• The Young Plan . Origin and Truth. Franz Mittelbach Verlag, Stuttgart 1950.

literature

• Hermann Graml : Between Stresemann and Hitler. The foreign policy of the presidential cabinets Brüning, Papen and Schleicher . Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-64583-8 (= series of quarterly journals for contemporary history , volume 83).
• Franz Knipping : Germany, France and the end of the Locarno era 1928–1931. Studies on international politics in the early stages of the Great Depression . Oldenbourg, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-486-53161-1 .
• Georg Kotowski:  Curtius, Julius. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 445 ( digitized version ).
• Andreas Rödder : Stresemann's legacy. Julius Curtius and German Foreign Policy 1929–1931 . Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 1996, ISBN 3-506-77499-9 (also: dissertation, University of Bonn, 1995).
• Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdR, the members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably exp. and revised Edition Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

Commons : Julius Curtius  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Julius Curtius in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Julius Curtius in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Julius Curtius in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see entry for the family in the Neue Deutsche Biographie at https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz130874.html#ndbcontent
2. ↑ Baden biographies . Volume 5, edited by Fred L. Sepaintner, Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-17-018976-X , p. 46.
   Peter D. Stachura : Political Leaders in Weimar Germany. A Biographical Study. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York et al. a. 1993, ISBN 0-7450-1261-2 , p. 27.
3. ↑ Hans Luther: Before the Abyss 1930-1933. Reichsbank President in times of crisis. Propylaea Verlag, Berlin 1964, p. 162 f.
4. ^ Rumbold: Documents on British Foreign Policy. Series II, Volume 2, ed. v. EL Woodward, London 1948, No. 262; Weizsäcker: The Weizsäcker papers 1933–1950 , ed. v. Leonidas E. Hill, Propylaea Publishing House, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main / Vienna 1974, p. 393; summarizing Hermann Graml : Between Stresemann and Hitler, the foreign policy of the presidential cabinets Brüning, Papen and Schleicher. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2001, p. 42.
5. ^ Paul Schmidt: Extra on the diplomatic stage 1923-1945. Experiences of the chief interpreter in the Foreign Office with the statesmen of Europe. From Stresemann and Briand to Hitler, Chamberlain and Molotov. Athenäum Verlag, Bonn 1949, p. 190.