Richard Lehners

Richard Lehners (born March 20, 1918 in Rüstringen ; † May 28, 2000 in Hanover ) was a German trade unionist and politician ( SPD ). From 1963 to 1967 he was President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament and from 1967 to 1974 Lower Saxony's Minister of the Interior .

Life

After attending elementary school and middle school, which he completed with a secondary school leaving certificate, Lehners completed an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer at the naval shipyard in Wilhelmshaven from 1934 to 1937 . He did Reich Labor Service from 1938 to 1939 and then took part in the Second World War as a soldier in the Air Force . At the end of the war he was taken prisoner, from which he was released in July 1945. After his release from captivity, he worked as a farm worker, dock worker and mechanical engineer in Bremen until 1947 .

Lehners joined the SPD in 1945 and was a full-time party secretary from July 1947 to November 1951. From November 1951 to December 1953 he worked as a social policy secretary for the DGB in Bremen and was there at the same time a member of the citizenship committees for home affairs and for the economy. From January 1954 to 1967 he was chairman of the DGB district committee of Hanover and a member of the board of the DGB regional district of Lower Saxony.

Lehners was elected as a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament in 1955 and won a direct mandate in the Hanover-Linden constituency , which he was able to defend in the state elections in 1959 , 1963 and 1967 . From 1963 to 1967 he was President of the State Parliament.

After Otto Bennemann no longer wanted to make himself available to a new state government for reasons of age, Egon Franke and Lehners applied for the office of interior minister , whereupon the latter prevailed in a fighting vote before the state committee of the SPD Lower Saxony with 39 against 24 votes. On July 5, 1967, Lehners was appointed Minister of the Interior to the government of Lower Saxony , led by Prime Minister Georg Diederichs , and in the following years acted as a potential successor to the Prime Minister alongside Alfred Kubel , Kurt Partzsch and Egon Franke. He was a member of the executive committee of the SPD district of Hanover from 1966 to 1975 and was nicknamed King Richard within the party . In the summer of 1969 he came under criticism from the right wing of the party because he had ordered the withdrawal of police units during the demonstrations of the Red Dot Action .

In April 1970 Lehners lost the internal party election to list candidates in his constituency for the state elections in June , lost to Bruno Orzykowski and did not even get a place on the state list . After the state election, however, he was able to prevail in the state committee against the applicants for the office of interior minister, Günter Kiehm and Horst Milde . Thereupon he was sworn in again in the single SPD government led by Prime Minister Kubel . One of his most important achievements during his term of office was the implementation of the administrative and territorial reform in Lower Saxony , which, however, did not meet with approval from the population or the SPD and thus diminished his influence and popularity.

In addition to his ministerial work, Lehners was a member of the supervisory board of Stahlwerke Peine-Salzgitter AG . Since he was instrumental in the passing of a law on the approval of public casinos in July 1973 and had subsequently awarded the concessions to private operators, he came into conflict with the Prime Minister. Kubel, who had previously publicly announced his rejection of the law, then saw him neither as a successor nor as a minister in his cabinet, so that after the formation of a social-liberal coalition, Lehners left the state government on July 10, 1974 and as Interior Minister von Rötger Large was replaced.

In the state elections in 1974 and 1978 , he was re-elected as a member of the state parliament, to which he belonged until 1982. In both electoral terms he entered parliament via the state list. From 1977 to 1981 Lehners was President of Hannover 96 .

In connection with the casino affair , he had to testify several times in 1988 before an investigative committee of the state parliament. It also looked at its role in terms of the way concessions are awarded.

Richard Lehners had been married since 1942 and had four children.

Honors

• 1966: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

See also

• Cabinet Diederichs IV - Cabinet Kubel I

literature

• Dirk Böttcher , Klaus Mlynek , Waldemar R. Röhrbein , Hugo Thielen : Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 , p. 227.
• Reimar Oltmanns : Searching for traces on scorched earth - reports, reports, narratives on contemporary history - Germany, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa (1969–2009). BoD, Norderstedt 2009, ISBN 978-3-8370-9507-4 , p. 118.

Web links

• Richard Lehners , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 04/1975 of January 13, 1975, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Richard Lehners at the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior and Sport

Individual evidence

1. ^ Delphi in committee . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1968, pp. 42-43 ( Online - Oct. 28, 1968 ).
2. ↑ Bartholomäus Grill: The ball is still rolling. In: Die Zeit No. 27 July 1, 1988, accessed December 17, 2012 . 
3. ↑ Can't be true . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1970, pp. 89 ( online - May 18, 1970 ).
4. ↑ Please . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1970, pp. 38, 41 ( Online - June 29, 1970 ).
5. ↑ Scratch on the face . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1974, p. 27 ( Online - July 1, 1974 ).
6. ↑ President / CEO of Hannover 96. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 3, 2014 ; Retrieved December 17, 2012 . 
7. ↑ A favor for L. In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1988, pp. 129-130 ( Online - Oct. 3, 1988 ).
8. ^ Lower Saxony State Archives: Online Finding Aids. Retrieved December 17, 2012 .