Protection cartel of German intellectual workers

The protection cartel of German intellectual workers was an organization founded in 1918 to represent the interests of members of higher, academic and quasi-academic professions.

The "protection cartel", initially founded on November 22, 1918 as the "Reich Committee of Academic Professions", included not only the associations of the so-called classic academic professions (pastors, judges, lawyers and notaries, doctors, senior teachers) but also the professional associations of new academic professional groups: see above the Association of German Graduate Engineers (VDDI, founded in 1909); the Association of Employed Chemists and Engineers (Budaci, founded in 1919) and the Association of Executives in Trade and Industry (Vela), whose members - including middle and senior management - were only partly academically educated. The umbrella organization, chaired by the theologian and DVP member of the Reichstag, Otto Everling , organized probably over 100,000 members of academic and quasi-academic professions. Since the mid-1920s, Everling provided the association magazines of the above-mentioned professional groups with articles that saw a way out of the income and employment crisis of the higher, in his diction, intellectual professions in a corporate social order. The association played a major role in establishing ethnic and - only in part identitarian - National Socialist ideas among the educated bourgeoisie. In 1934 the “protection cartel” dissolved.

literature

• Tobias Sander: The double defense. Situation, mentalities and radical conservative politics of engineers in Germany , in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 53 (2005), pp. 301–322