Klaus Ritter (Political Advisor)

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Klaus Ritter (born September 18, 1918 in Kassel ; † January 27, 2015 in Agatharied ) was a German political advisor and lawyer . He was the founder and head of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP) for many years .

family

Klaus Ritter's father Karl Bernhard Ritter was a theologian and DNVP politician, his uncle Hellmut Ritter was an orientalist , and another uncle, Gerhard Ritter , was a historian .

Life path

Klaus Ritter was a soldier from 1938. During the Second World War he was captain of the artillery and from 1942 to early 1944 he worked in the High Command of the Army (OKH), where he was part of the reconnaissance department “ Foreign Heere East ” headed by Major General Reinhard Gehlen , whose task was to analyze strength and condition of the Soviet armed forces. Ritter got to know Richard von Weizsäcker , among others . On the Baltic peninsula of Sworbe , in 1944, Ritter and his troops managed to free themselves from Soviet encirclement, a military achievement for which he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross .

In 1946 he married Margarete, nee Hachtmann, with whom he had five children: Michael, Anke, Amadé, Manuel and Nikolai.

After the war, Ritter studied law and philosophy in Göttingen and Marburg and, after passing the state examination in law, graduated in 1951 with a thesis on natural law and legal positivism.

For years, Ritter was a member of the " Organization Gehlen ", which in 1956 gave rise to the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), i.e. the German foreign secret service. Most recently he was head of political evaluation there. Under the code name “Dr. Röhl "put on a dossier for the CIA in 1953 on supposedly or actually" left "journalists in the Federal Republic, in which he recommended a" closer examination of the editorial staff ".

In 1960 Ritter returned to Germany from a stay in the USA as a Harvard scholar .

Ritter was one of the founders of the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Wissenschaft und Politik" (AWP), which was established in 1962 by a group of politicians and business representatives. The AWP initiated the establishment of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP) and its Institute for International Politics and Security, of which Ritter was director from 1962 to March 1988. Until 1995 he was a member of the executive board of SWP. Since 1969, Ritter was also an honorary professor at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

The AWP, co-founded by Ritter, now operates as “Forum Ebenhausen eV - Friends of the Science and Politics Foundation”.

In April 1988, Ritter retired. His successor as director of the research institute of the Science and Politics Foundation was the historian Michael Stürmer .

On January 27, 2015, Klaus Ritter died at the age of 96. He was buried on February 5, 2015 in the forest cemetery in Gauting .

Publications

  • Klaus Ritter, “Between natural law and legal positivism. An epistemological examination of recent attempts to restore legal metaphysics ", Luther-Verlag, Witten 1956, 128 pages, (dissertation)
  • Hans Maier , Klaus Ritter, Ulrich Matz, "Politics and Science", Beck, 1971, 573 pages
  • Klaus Ritter, "The Dominance of the East-West Conflict", in: Europa-Archiv, Volume 40, Wilhelm Cornides (ed.), Verlag für Internationale Politik, 1985, p. 1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ so the entry "Ritter, Klaus" in Munzinger - Internationales Biographisches Archiv, http://www.munzinger.de/document/00000018788 . According to the Hessen Information System, Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAM), inventory 340 Ritter b, https://arcinsys.hessen.de/arcinsys/windowprintdetail.action?detailid=b1014 , Margarethe Hachtmann (* 1893) was not the wife of Klaus Ritter, but that of his father Karl Bernhard Ritter, so Klaus Ritter's mother
  2. ↑ Willi Winkler, “The brown network: How the Federal Republic was led to success by earlier Nazis”, Rowohlt-Verlag, 2019, p. 93, https://books.google.de/books?id=M95XDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT93&lpg=PT93

swell

personal data
SURNAME Knight, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political advisor, founding director of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP)
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 2015
Place of death Agatharied