Niederwald conference

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The conference location Jagdschloss Niederwald

The Niederwald Conference was a conference of the eleven West German minister-presidents that took place in 1948 with a total of three sessions in the Niederwald hunting lodge near Rüdesheim am Rhein . For the second time, the subject of the conference was the three Frankfurt documents of July 1, 1948. In it, the Western powers gave the Prime Minister the task of founding a Western state . The first time they worked out the “ Koblenz Decisions ” in response to the Rittersturz conference near Koblenz . However, this reaction had not been accepted by the Western powers, so that new deliberations were necessary. The most important result of the Niederwald Conference was the resolution of the Prime Ministers of the states in the western occupation zones to agree to the request of the Western Allies to found a western part of the state without giving up the claim to an all-German nation-state . They decided to prepare a “provisional constitution”. The Constitutional Convention on Herrenchiemsee later served this purpose .

On the way to the Basic Law , the Niederwald hunting lodge played a role as a conference venue and thus became a historical place of German constitutional history .

prehistory

The victorious powers opened up the possibility of drafting a constitution for the three western zones of occupation in the wake of the tensions of the emerging Cold War : after the February revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the USA and Great Britain sought to establish a West German state in order to oppose further expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence and to include them in the future in the military security alliance they were currently working on. France saw the German threat as similar to that from the Soviet Union and was therefore skeptical, but was able to change its mind at the London Six Power Conference (February 23 to June 2, 1948), in which the Benelux countries also took part. It was there that the so-called London Recommendations emerged : the military governors of the three western powers were commissioned to authorize the eleven prime ministers of the western German states to convene a constituent assembly to prepare for the establishment of a democratic state on their territory. The military governors passed this order on to the state chiefs on July 1st in the Frankfurt documents , which are considered the "birth certificate of the Federal Republic". But they saw in the establishment of a western state the danger of a final division of Germany and expressed their fears at the Prime Minister 's Conference in Koblenz , the Rittersturz Conference . The prime ministers accepted the Frankfurt documents, insisting that only a provisional solution should come out of them and that instead of a constitution a mere "organizational statute".

Due to these differences, there were various upsets on both sides. The American military governor Lucius D. Clay spoke of "irresponsible" Koblenz steps on the part of the Prime Minister, which represented "a catastrophic disregard for the seriousness of the pan-European situation". It turned out that the military governors had no room for negotiation to deviate from the London recommendations. These London recommendations represented a fragile compromise by the Western powers that should no longer be questioned. They formed the basis of the Frankfurt documents, but had not been communicated to the German side.

Sequence of meetings

The first conference took place on July 15 and 16 and discussed the reaction of the military governors to the Koblenz resolutions. At the second conference on July 21 and 22, the Koblenz resolutions were revised and replaced by a new statement. On July 26th, this position was discussed in a third round of negotiations with the military governors and an agreement was reached. The final conference finally took place on August 31st.

decisions

After consultations with the military governors in Frankfurt, the regional leaders met in July 1948 at the Niederwald hunting lodge for a first conference to inform each other about the talks. In the castle in the Rheingau, the minister-presidents met three times in the course of the deliberations on the drafting of a constitution. The most important conference took place on 21./22. July 1948 in the so-called "Green Salon" of the hunting lodge.

The rejection of both the establishment of a western state and the drafting of a constitution by the heads of states, which had been expressed in the Koblenz resolutions, gave way to a willingness to compromise in favor of the idea of ​​the western allies. The minister-presidents decided to follow the guidelines of the Frankfurt documents in terms of content, but to stay on the knight's fall line in terms of terminology in order to maintain the character of a provisional arrangement. That meant: Basic Law instead of a Constitution and a Parliamentary Council instead of a Constituent Assembly. These compromises, which paved the way for the drafting of the Basic Law, were significantly influenced by the Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter ( SPD ), who advocated a West German solution.

West Berlin was just threatened by the Berlin blockade by the Soviet Union, with which it was to be cut off from all supplies by the Western Allies. Reuter emphasized that in the east and in Berlin one could not bear that the west could remain in its previous undecided status. Reuter spoke of a core state idea according to which the Soviet occupation zone would return to the “common motherland” due to the economic and political conditions in the western part: “We are of the opinion that the political and economic consolidation of the West is an elementary prerequisite for the recovery of our conditions and for the return of the East to the common motherland. ”With that, the Koblenz resolutions began to crumble. It was already clear that a further rejection of the Western Allies' mandate to lay the foundation for a western state would provoke a political conflict that would put blocked Berlin in great danger. The division of Germany was practically complete in 1948, and a concrete and immediate prospect of overcoming it was not in sight. There was no realistic alternative to the US course, which was slowly developing from an occupying power to a protecting power. It was not clear what consequences the Western powers would draw from further delay or even rejection, and what risks this would mean. Therefore it could only be about the modalities of an approval. Therefore, the Prime Ministers decided to set up a West German state that was supposed to be a provisional solution. The creation of a West German polity should not be understood as an act of the final self-abandonment of the German nation-state. A provisional reservation had to be made, it was indispensable. That this community had to have the character of a state was a plausible consequence. Only a West German community that was designed as a state could also claim sovereignty .

Only Carlo Schmid (SPD) still represented the Koblenz line and later referred to the emerging constitution as a “constitution in bondage”. In their statement, the country chiefs summarized their resolutions for the military governors and presented with great clarity the commonalities of their goals with the Frankfurt documents.

Agreement in the third round of negotiations

The opinion of the Niederwald Conference formed the basis for the third round of negotiations between the three Western military governors and the German Prime Minister, which took place on July 26, 1948 in Frankfurt. Here an agreement was reached to begin immediately with the organization of the three western zones of occupation on the basis of the London recommendations. The state parliaments should now make the necessary preparations to select the representatives for the Parliamentary Council, which should draft the provisional constitution for a western state. This council was to meet no later than September 1, 1948.

The compromise with the military governors consisted in the prime minister accepting the factual demands of the Frankfurt documents. For their part, the military governors accepted their requests for changes in terminology. The term “ Constituent Assembly ” was replaced by “Parliamentary Council” and “Constitution” by “Basic Law”. The Prime Ministers translated the term Basic Law as “basic constitutional law” in order to make it palatable to the Allies; henceforth it was to stand for a constitution that was at the same time a provisional arrangement.

The counter-idea of ​​the Prime Ministers that the Basic Law should not be ratified by a referendum but by the state parliaments was referred to the governments of the Western powers for the final decision. It followed later and followed the German wishes.

The submission of German proposals to change the national borders was still open. Here, the prime ministers were given a deadline of October 1, 1948 by the military governors. As a result, a national border committee was convened, which also met on the Niederwald. The deliberations on the reorganization of the states were concluded with the third conference of prime ministers at Niederwald Castle on August 31, 1948 with a decision to create a south-western state .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Manfred Görtemaker : History of the Federal Republic of Germany. From the foundation to the present , CH Beck, Munich 1999, pp. 45–49.
  2. ^ Rudolf Morsey : The Federal Republic of Germany. Origin and development until 1969 (=  Oldenbourg floor plan of history , vol. 19). Munich 2007, ISBN 3-486-58319-0 , p. 17 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  3. ^ Henning Köhler : Germany on the way to itself. A history of the century . Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, p. 478 f.
  4. ↑ On the events, cf. in detail Horst Möller , Changes in Occupation Policy in Germany 1945–1949 , in: Bernhard Diestelkamp , Zentarô Kitagawa, Josef Kreiner u. a. (Ed.): Between continuity and external determination. On the influence of the occupying powers on the German and Japanese legal system from 1945 to 1950. German-Japanese symposium in Tokyo from April 6 to 9, 1994 , Mohr, Tübingen 1996, pp. 37–53; Adolf M. Birke , The Allied Contribution to the Reorganization of Local and State Constitutions in Germany , in: Diestelkamp u. a. (Ed.), Between Continuity and Foreign Determination, ibid, pp. 79–96.
  5. ^ Manfred Görtemaker: History of the Federal Republic of Germany. From the foundation to the present , Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-16043-X , p. 55.
  6. ↑ Federal Republic: Berlin to the Heart , Der Spiegel No. 46/1966 of November 7, 1966. According to Hans-Peter Schwarz , Vom Reich zur Bundes Republik , Deutschland in the Contention of Foreign Policy Concepts in the Years of Occupation 1945 to 1949 , it was “the Berlin SPD leader Ernst Reuter, who implemented the western state theory at the crucial moment ”.
  7. ↑ Theo Stammen, Gerold Maier: The process of constitution . In: Josef Becker, Theo Stammen, Peter Waldmann (eds.): Prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany. Between surrender and the Basic Law . Fink, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7705-1769-5 , p. 381 ff., Here p. 392.
  8. ^ Peter Graf von Kielmansegg : After the catastrophe. A history of divided Germany . Siedler, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-329-5 , p. 67 f.
  9. ↑ Theo Stammen, Gerold Maier: The process of constitution . In: Josef Becker, Theo Stammen, Peter Waldmann (eds.): Prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany. Between surrender and the Basic Law . Fink, Munich 1979, p. 381 ff., Here p. 392 f.
  10. ↑ One lives. With very little effort . In: Der Spiegel , issue 32/1948, August 7, 1948, p. 5 f. (Second meeting of the National Borders Committee).
  11. ^ Birgit Wilhelm: The state of Baden-Württemberg. History - Constitutional Law - Constitutional Policy , Böhlau, Cologne 2007, p. 49 .

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz : From occupation to the Federal Republic. Stages in the founding of a state 1946–1949 . Frankfurt am Main 1984.

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