Reinhold Schairer

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Reinhold Schairer (born October 26, 1887 in Pfeffingen / Württ. , † May 10, 1971 in Copenhagen ) was a German association official and education expert. For many years he was managing director of the German Student Union in the Weimar Republic . After 1945 he was involved in founding the Carl Duisberg Society and the Volkswagenwerk Foundation .

Live and act

The son of a prison pastor studied law, philosophy and pedagogy in Tübingen, Berlin and Geneva and in 1914 for Dr. phil. PhD. During the First World War , from 1915 to 1920 he headed the German POW Relief Agency in Copenhagen. During this time he studied on the one hand the teachings of Grundtvig and the Danish public education system. On the other hand, he established close contacts with the German envoy and later Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau , who took him to the peace negotiations in Versailles in 1919 as a member of the German delegation . Schairer also met the publisher Eugen Diederichs in Denmark .

After the war, Schairer was one of the founders of the German Student Union (DSW) in 1921 , of which he was director until 1933. Numerous student social institutions (canteens, dormitories, loan offices, etc.) go back to his initiative as well as the German National Academic Foundation , founded in 1925 , which helped almost 23,000 young people to gain academic training by 1933. Since 1928 he was also managing director of the Abraham Lincoln Foundation with Hans Simons , which campaigned for the strengthening of democratic forces in German higher education.

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Schairer was relieved of all his functions and a year later emigrated to London via Copenhagen, where he worked as a lecturer at the Educational Department of King's College and from 1937 at the Institute of Education at the University of London , and finally also at the British Took citizenship. During this time he acted as a liaison for Carl Friedrich Goerdelers , who sought contact with the British government on behalf of German resistance groups. He managed to establish contact with the British Foreign Office and found an avid supporter in Frank Ashton-Gwatkin. He was also able to win over Robert Vansittart , who was an influential Permanent United States Under Secretary of State at the time , as a sponsor.

In 1940 Schairer moved to the USA, where he taught, among other things, as a visiting professor at New York University . In the USA, too, he and Gotthilf Bronisch organized meetings for Goerdeler with high-ranking American personalities. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, he establishes the US Committee for Educational Reconstruction. He was also involved in the State Department in planning for a European post-war order and returned to Germany after the end of the Second World War as an advisor on educational issues to the staff of General Lucius D. Clay and John McCloy . From 1950 to 1954 Schairer was a member of the German Mission to the Marshall Plan Administration in Washington, DC

In 1956 he finally returned to Germany and took over the management of the German Institute for Talent Studies in Cologne. The institute propagated measures against the emerging lack of engineers and other technical specialists in Germany at the time. Schairer was also instrumental in founding the Carl Duisberg Society and the Volkswagenwerk Foundation .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Malcolm Richardson, Juergen Reulecke and Frank Trommler .: Weimar's transatlantic patron. The Lincoln Foundation 1927 to 1934 . Klartext, Essen 2008.
  2. ↑ a b c Joachim Scholtyseck: Robert Bosch and the liberal resistance against Hitler 1933 to 1945. CH Beck, 1999, p. 229. Digitized at Google Books .
  3. ↑ See also: AP Young: The 'X' Documents. The secret history of Foreign Office contacts with the German Resistance, 1937-1929. London 1974.

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personal data
SURNAME Schairer, Reinhold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German association functionary and education expert
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Pfeffingen
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1971
Place of death Copenhagen