Leslie Hore-Belisha, 1st Baron Hore-Belisha

Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1951

Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha, 1st Baron Hore-Belisha , PC (born September 7, 1893 in Plymouth , England , † February 16, 1957 in Reims , France ) was a British politician ( National Liberal Party ), including Minister of Transport and Minister of War .

Live and act

Youth and Education (1893–1922)

Hore-Belisha was born in 1893 as Isaac Leslie Belisha in the Plymouther district of Devonport, the son of the Morocco insurance businessman Jacob Isaac Belisha and his wife Elizabeth Miriam Miers. Belisha's descent - the father came from a family of Sephardic Jews - was always the cause of violent anti-Semitic hostility in the area, but also among opponents of the kingdom: For example, Adolf Hitler called "the Jewish War Minister Hore-Belisha" in his monologues at the Führer Headquarters next to Winston Churchill , Anthony Eden and Lord Vansittart the main person responsible for the British declaration of war on Germany ( Werner Jochmann : Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, Hamburg 1980, p. 93).

After his father's death in 1894, Belisha was raised by his mother alone. After his mother remarried to Sir Adair Hore in 1912, the latter adopted Belisha, who then took his surname into his own and added it to Hore-Belisha.

Hore-Belisha completed his training at Clifton College and later at the Universities of Paris and Heidelberg and at St John's College at Oxford University . In 1912 he became a member of the Frankonia fraternity in Heidelberg . At the First World War, Hore-Belisha participated as Major, where he mainly was used in the British overseas territories. After the war he started working as a barrister , a lawyer with a limited field of activity.

Political career (1922–1942)

After Hore-Belisha's first candidacy as a Liberal MP for the British Parliament in the constituency of Plymouth Devonport had been unsuccessful in the British general election in 1922 , he succeeded in the election of 1923 as a candidate for the same constituency in the lower house. There he distinguished himself first through his extravagant appearance and his brilliant speeches. Together with Sir John Simon , Hore-Belisha gradually advanced to become the leader of the right wing of his party, whose support for the Labor minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald he firmly refused.

After the general election of 1931 , he moved to the Board of Trade as Undersecretary of State as a member of the all-party government under MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin . After his party's withdrawal from the government as a result of the internal government conflict over the free trade issue in 1932, he remained in the government and was promoted to finance secretary in the treasury .

In 1934, Hore-Belisha moved into the cabinet as Minister of Transport and in this capacity was jointly responsible for the mass motorization of the British population that began in the 1930s: he not only adapted the highway code, the British road traffic regulations, to the changed circumstances, but also led for the first time in Great Britain driving tests for new drivers and the light signal for traffic regulation named after him, the Belisha Beacon.

In 1937, Hore-Belisha was appointed Minister of War by the new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to succeed Alfred Duff Cooper (Sec. Of state for war). This decision aroused fierce criticism, especially in conservative circles: on the one hand, because it was believed that such a significant position should not be placed by a member of the party of the weaker coalition partner, on the other hand because of Belisha's Jewish descent and, lastly, because of accusations made by him a " warmonger " and " Bolsheviks " were called. A recurring accusation in the British public was the suspicion that Hore-Belisha was aiming for a war, although this would harm the British people in order to protect the interests of the Jews of the European continent.

Although Hore-Belisha made a contribution to improving the living conditions of British soldiers (better pay, housing and promotion opportunities, especially for the working class recruits) and provided the British armed forces with better armor and equipment than they had before he took office, His Jewish ancestry also brought him numerous hostilities in the troops: For example, one line of songs in a popular British soldier song of the first months of the war was “Die for Jewish freedom / As a Briton always dies”.

In January 1940, just under four and a half months after the beginning of World War II , Hore-Belisha was dismissed as Minister of War by Chamberlain. He turned down the trade minister he had been offered as a substitute, as did Chamberlain's offer to make him minister of information for fear of supplying Nazi propaganda with "ammunition by appointing a Jew".

In 1942, Hore-Belisha left the Liberal Nationals and from then on sat as an independent member of parliament. In 1944 he married Cynthia Elliot (1916–1991). Under the conservative transitional government, which took care of state affairs on an interim basis from May to August 1945, Hore-Belisha acted as Minister of National Insurance , albeit not with the rank of cabinet member.

In the general election of 1945, Hore-Belisha was defeated by Labor rival Michael Foot and resigned from parliament, but returned - after switching to the Conservative Party in 1947 - after the election in 1950 , before being defeated by Queen Elizabeth in 1954 II. Was raised to the nobility and moved into the upper house .

Hore-Belisha died in Reims in February 1957 while he was visiting France as head of a delegation from the British Parliament : he collapsed during a speech in the town hall and died a few minutes later of a cerebral hemorrhage .

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians, Part 7: Supplement A – K, Winter, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8253-6050-4 . Pp. 485-486.
• Anthony John Trythall: The Downfall of Leslie Hore-Belisha . In: Journal of Contemporary History , vol. (1981), pp. 391-411.

Web links

• Lord Leslie Hore-Belisha in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Newspaper article about Leslie Hore-Belisha, 1st Baron Hore-Belisha in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .