Otto Klepper

Otto Klepper (born August 17, 1888 in Brotterode ; † May 11, 1957 in Berlin-Zehlendorf ) was a German lawyer and politician .

Life and work

After graduating from high school in 1908 at the humanistic grammar school in Hammonense , Klepper studied law in Marburg , Berlin and Münster , and was primarily influenced by Lorenz von Stein's social studies . He was appointed trainee lawyer in August 1914 and passed the second state law examination in December 1920. In between, it was used as a dispatch rider in the First World War and he married Gertrud Eickhoff, with whom he had four children. From 1921 he worked as in-house counsel at the Reformbund der Gutshöfe, in 1923 he became a managing board member of the domain tenant association and in 1924 chairman of the board of the Deutsche Lächter-Kreditbank. From 1928 he was president of the Prussian Central Cooperative Fund. In this office he carried out numerous liberal reforms, for which he was heavily criticized by the agrarian conservative side. In 1931 he became the Prussian finance minister.

When the coalition of SPD and DDP lost the majority in the state elections on April 24, 1932, there was no new coalition capable of governing because the other parties did not have a sufficient majority. Therefore, the Otto Braun government remained in office as "executive" and Otto Klepper was Minister of Finance. On July 20, 1932, the Reich government set Papen in a coup, the so-called blow to Prussia , by decree of the Prussian state government under the pretext from that she had lost control of public order in Prussia (see also: Altona Bloody Sunday ). Braun and Carl Severing , who at least had 90,000 men in the Republican Prussian police force - the Reichswehr of the Reich government itself only had 100,000 men - let themselves be appointed on the same day by a newly appointed - in the opinion of Braun and Severing illegal - new police president with two Chase police officers out of offices and offices. Klepper was no longer in office. Klepper was appalled by the fatalism and passivity of Braun and Severing, as he wrote on the anniversary of the Prussian strike in the exile magazine Das Neue Tage-Buch in Paris.

Shortly after the Reichstag fire and in the face of persecution of all democrats, Klepper fled to the Finnish embassy in Berlin in February 1933 . He then went into exile via Finland to China , where he worked as a government advisor in financial management until 1935. He then stayed in exile in the United States , Spain , France and Mexico . In 1937 he was expatriated from the German Reich and founded the German Freedom Party while in exile in Paris .

Klepper returned to Germany in 1947, settled in Frankfurt am Main and worked there as a lawyer and notary. He was a co-founder of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and briefly managed it. He was also deputy chairman of the Economic Policy Society of 1947 , whose policy statement he helped formulate.

Political party

A claim that Klepper was a member of the DNVP was based on a statement by Erwin Topf that was modified over several stations and cannot be proven in the party files. Klepper himself affirmed in a letter to the editor in 1951 that he had not previously belonged to any party and that he was “still non-party”.

literature

Martin Schumacher : Klepper, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , pp. 49-51 ( digitized version ).
Astrid von Pufendorf: Otto Klepper (1888–1957). German patriot and citizen of the world . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-486-56241-X .
Astrid von Pufendorf: Courage for utopia. Otto Klepper - a person between times . Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-95542-118-2 .
Otto Klepper in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Literature by and about Otto Klepper in the catalog of the German National Library
Otto Klepper in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Files Edition . Weimar Republic

Newspaper article about Otto Klepper in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

↑ Patrick Bormann, Joachim Scholtyseck, Harald Wixforth: The central credit cooperative institutions from the beginning of the First World War to the unconditional surrender of the Nazi state (1914-1945) . In: Institute for bank history research eV (Ed.): The history of the DZ Bank. Cooperative central banking from the 19th century to the present day . Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64063-6 , pp. 194-216 .
↑ Das Neue Tage-Buch , Ed. Leopold Schwarzschild Paris - Amsterdam, No. 4, July 22, 1933, pp. 90ff
^ Peter Hoeres: Newspaper for Germany. The history of the FAZ . Benevento, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-7109-0080-8 .
^ Economic and Political Society of 1947 e. V. (Wipog): History of Wipog. Text from 2007 on “wipog.de”. (accessed May 9, 2020)
↑ Pufendorf 1997, p. 22

personal data
SURNAME	Klepper, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German lawyer and politician (DNVP, DDP / DStP, later non-party)
DATE OF BIRTH	17th August 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH	Brotterode
DATE OF DEATH	May 11, 1957
Place of death	Berlin-Zehlendorf

[1] Patrick Bormann, Joachim Scholtyseck, Harald Wixforth: The central credit cooperative institutions from the beginning of the First World War to the unconditional surrender of the Nazi state (1914-1945) . In: Institute for bank history research eV (Ed.): The history of the DZ Bank. Cooperative central banking from the 19th century to the present day . Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64063-6 , pp. 194-216 .

[2] Das Neue Tage-Buch , Ed. Leopold Schwarzschild Paris - Amsterdam, No. 4, July 22, 1933, pp. 90ff

[3] Peter Hoeres: Newspaper for Germany. The history of the FAZ . Benevento, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-7109-0080-8 .

[4] Economic and Political Society of 1947 e. V. (Wipog): History of Wipog. Text from 2007 on “wipog.de”. (accessed May 9, 2020)

[5] Pufendorf 1997, p. 22