Maria Meyer-Sevenich

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Maria Meyer-Sevenich in 1967 together with Helmut Schmidt

Maria Meyer-Sevenich (born April 27, 1907 in Cologne , † March 3, 1970 in Hanover ) was a German politician ( SAPD , KPD , CDU , SPD and again CDU).

Origin and youth

Maria Sevenich was born on April 27, 1907 as the daughter of a Cologne master blacksmith. After attending elementary school and the municipal business school in Cologne, she first completed an apprenticeship as an office worker, later took her Abitur (special gifted qualification examination) in evening classes and began studying law and philosophy in Frankfurt am Main in 1929 . For political reasons she had to drop out after eight semesters because she was not admitted to the exam.

First political activities

Meyer-Sevenich had joined the KJVD during her studies . She joined the SPD in 1928 , but left the party after a short time and was a co-founder of the SAPD in 1931 . Since 1932 she was also a member of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the KPD (LO), where she cooperated closely with Roman Well, who was later exposed as a GPU agent . In January 1933 she left the LO and SAPD together with Well's 35-strong group and switched to the KPD . In 1937 she left the KPD again.

Resistance and Exile

After the takeover of the Nazis Sevenich was arrested twice after being denounced a Communist. She fled to Switzerland at the end of 1933 and from there went to France in 1937 . In the following years she distanced herself from communism and turned to the Catholic Church . She began studying the French language. In June 1942 she was on the Gestapo arrested, transferred to Germany and here by a special court to two years in prison convicted. After serving her sentence in the Schwalmstadt correctional facility , she was taken back to Gestapo detention. In 1945 she was freed from the prison in Darmstadt when American troops marched in .

post war period

After the Second World War she participated in the founding of the CDU in Hesse and was elected to the state executive committee of the CDU Greater Hesse . She also took part in the founding of the German construction movement and was its managing director in Darmstadt. In October 1946 she went on a 30-day hunger strike to draw the attention of the Allied occupying power and the world to the expected famine in the winter of 1946/1947. In 1947 she married Werner Meyer. From 1946 to 1947 she was also the Catholic regional chairman of the CDU regional women's committee, today's women's union . Now a radical opponent of Marxism , she rejected the grand coalition in Hesse, which led to conflicts in the then rather left-wing CDU Hesse . Due to fundamental economic and socio-political differences, she left the CDU in May 1948 and rejoined the SPD in October 1949. In addition, from 1949 she was the editor of the information service for questions of Christian politics . In February 1970 she resigned from the SPD due to differences in Eastern and German policy and was re-admitted to the CDU shortly before her death.

MP and Minister

In 1946 Meyer-Sevenich was a member of the Advisory State Committee and the Constitutional Assembly of Greater Hesse. In 1947 she was elected to the Lower Saxony state parliament for the CDU , to which she belonged from the first to her death during the sixth electoral term. Since May 1948 she was an independent member of parliament before she was accepted into the SPD parliamentary group in September of the same year. After Curt Miehe's death , Meyer-Sevenich was appointed Minister for Federal Affairs, Displaced Persons and Refugees to the government of Lower Saxony led by Prime Minister Georg Diederichs on October 13, 1965 . On July 5, 1967, she was replaced in this role by Herbert Hellmann . After leaving the party because of the SPD's Ostpolitik , she became a member of the CDU parliamentary group again in February 1970. Meyer-Sevenich died on March 3, 1970 of complications from diabetes .

Honors

  • 1962: Lower Saxony Great Cross of Merit
  • 1966: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
  • Maria-Sevenich-Weg in Darmstadt

See also

literature

  • "... towards democracy" - The minutes of the Advisory State Committee of Greater Hesse in 1946 - A documentation, edited by Bernhard Parisius and Jutta Scholl-Seibert , Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 3-930221-05-5 , page 46– 47

Web links

Commons : Maria Meyer-Sevenich  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On Maria Sevenich's membership in the LO and the conversion to the KPD, see: Wolfgang Alles: On the politics and history of the German Trotskyists from 1930 . 2nd edition, Cologne 1994, p. 147 and Hanno Drechsler: Die Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SAPD). A contribution to the history of the German labor movement at the end of the Weimar Republic. Meisenheim am Glan 1965, p. 310.
  2. ↑ Klaus Otto Skibowski: Future with the CDU ?, ECON-Verlag 1970, ISBN 9783430185523 , page 80
personal data
SURNAME Meyer-Sevenich, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sevenich, Maria (birth name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU, SPD), MdL
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1970
Place of death Hanover