Theodor Tantzen the Younger

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Theodor Tantzen

Theodor Johann Tantzen the Elder J. (born June 14, 1877 in Heering bei Abbehausen ; † January 11, 1947 in Oldenburg ) was a German politician and farmer .

Life

Family and early years

Theodor Tantzen was born as the son of the farmer Theodor Johann Tantzen the Elder. Ä. and Anna Magdalene geb. Lührs (1835–1919) born. He came from a long-established Butjadinger farming family who were among the dignitaries of the Oldenburg region . Like his father, Tantzen's grandfather Hergen Tantzen (1789-1853) was already a member of the Oldenburg state parliament . Furthermore, Tantzen's brother Ernst (1857-1926) and a cousin, Hergen Robert Tantzen (1860-1944), belonged to this body, so that at times three aunties belonged to the state parliament.

After three years of primary school in Abbehausen, he attended what was then the Oberrealschule in Oldenburg , today's Herbartgymnasium Oldenburg . During this time he lived with his sister Henriette (1862–1941) and was friends with her son, the later philosopher Karl Jaspers . He graduated from school in 1892 with a one-year certificate and returned to his parents' farm in Heering, which he took over after his father's death in 1893. He did his military service as a one-year volunteer in 1895/96 with the 2nd Royal Saxon Jäger Battalion No. 13 in Dresden . On September 10, 1901, he married the pastor's daughter Ottilie Margarete Fischer von Baltrum (1879–1972). The marriage produced five sons, three of whom survived World War II .

Tantzen developed into an expert in cattle breeding and became a member of the Oldenburg Chamber of Agriculture and the cattle recycling center. In this role he traveled to neutral Denmark during the First World War and organized the import of breeding cattle.

Entry into politics

As early as 1897, Tantzen, continuing the family tradition of political activity, joined the Free People's Party , which was transformed into the Progressive People's Party (FVP) in 1910 . In the elections to the Abbehausen municipal council in October 1901, his name was wrongly excluded from the electoral list due to a formal error. A little later, he was elected by the local council as district chairman for the period from 1902 to 1906, but did not accept the election because of his work for the trade agreement association , an association that supported the left-wing liberals, and his political involvement in the Reichstag election campaign of 1903. Nevertheless, he joined the council of Abbehausen.

In February 1911 he was elected to the executive committee of the Progressive People's Party and in the same year a member of the state parliament . He was an advocate of free trade and against a protective tariff policy ; He also campaigned for reforms in the school system . He advocated general democratization and cooperation with social democracy .

In 1916 he was elected by his party as chairman of their Oldenburg / Ostfriesland district. Through war experiences in Poland, he turned into a pacifist . In the November Revolution of 1918 he played a decisive role and became a member of the Oldenburg transitional government, the so-called Directory , to which he belonged as a minister , alongside the SPD deputy Paul Hug and others from November 11, 1918 . On November 9, he was also elected to the Oldenburg Soldiers' Council.

In the Weimar Republic

In the period after the First World War , after the dissolution of the FVP, Tantzen became a member of the DDP .

On January 19, 1919 he was elected to the constituent Weimar National Assembly for constituency 15 (Aurich-Oldenburg-Osnabrück) . He took part in the negotiations on the constitution in Weimar in October 1919 as well as in the deliberations of the constituent state assembly in the Free State of Oldenburg , into which he was elected on February 23, 1919. After this constitution was adopted on June 17, the state parliament consequently elected Tantzen as the leader of the strongest party (30.5%) as Prime Minister on June 21, 1919 . He was confirmed in office after the June 1920 election. In addition to leading the entire ministry, he also acted as head of the foreign and interior ministries and, from October 1, 1921, as head of the ministry for churches and schools. In October 1919 Tantzen founded the Oldenburg Order Police as the second state police force alongside the Oldenburg Gendarmerie Corps .

Tantzen's republican and democratic sentiments were clearly expressed in his clear rejection of attempts at monarchist restoration, sole claims to rule by the council movement and in his strict measures to ward off the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. As Prime Minister Tantzen emphatically backed the Reich government, had the executive power for Oldenburg and the Prussian Wilhelmshaven transferred and covered drastic measures against putschist officers. The slow coping with the putsch and the lack of prosecution and punishment of the guilty parties he took several times to complain to the responsible Reichswehr Minister , his party friend Otto Geßler , which resulted in hard arguments in the board meetings of the DDP.

Tantzen was a member of his party's executive committee for most of the Weimar Republic. In 1918/19 he was initially on the provisional main board, then in 1921/22 on the board as acting minister of state, in 1925/27 in the party committee and in 1927/30 as an elected board member. As a leftist Democrat, however, he was part of a minority in the committee and was unable to enforce his convictions about the republicanization of the Reichswehr and cooperation with the SPD. Only after the murder of Walther Rathenau on June 24, 1922 did a brief rapprochement with the restoration-oriented representatives of his party, such as Erich Koch-Weser and Hugo Preuss .

In 1923 the short phase of the Weimar coalition ended in Oldenburg and with it Tantzen's ministerial presidency. With the consent of Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno , he wanted to postpone the new elections to the state parliament because of the occupation of the Ruhr , during which the Oldenburg region of Birkenfeld was also occupied by French troops. The state parliament rejected the constitutional amendment required for this, however, with the votes of the right-wing and parts of the split center faction. Tantzen then resigned his office voluntarily, so that as a result of the failure of stable majorities in the Oldenburg state parliament, civil servant governments basically governed until 1932.

In 1924 he went on an information trip to the United States , and in September 1926 he went on a four-week information trip through Russia and the Ukraine , where he met Soviet agricultural experts. The journey took the passenger ship Prussia from Stettin to Leningrad , from there to Moscow , Charkow , Novorossiysk and Odessa , from where he traveled back to Germany via Poland .

After the negative experiences with majority formation and civil servant governments in Oldenburg, Tantzen turned to imperial politics in the following years and, among other things, voted for a reorganization of the states in the German Empire by means of the imperial reform . Since the elections in May 1928 he sat for constituency 13 (Schleswig-Holstein) as part of the DDP parliamentary group in the Reichstag . Once again he advocated an agricultural policy in line with the DDP's 1927 agricultural program, which he had a major part in, and which was intended to promote family farms.

He resigned from the DDP on April 24, 1930 and resigned his seat in the Reichstag in May after serious disputes with the Minister of Food, Hermann Dietrich (also DDP), because of his stance on the agricultural issue . Tantzen's opposition to the now-established presidential government of the Brüning I cabinet , to which Dietrich belonged as Minister of Economics, also played a role. Instead, Tantzen advocated the establishment of a united liberal middle party, which should facilitate the formation of a government through majorities. His departure from the party received wide attention and the merger of the DDP and the Young German Order to form the German State Party at the end of July 1930 can ultimately be seen as a consequence of his departure.

During the Weimar Republic, Tantzen belonged to the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold organization for the protection of the republic .

In the time of National Socialism

As a democrat, Tantzen was a clear opponent of National Socialism , but recognized its attraction to the evangelical peasant population of his homeland since 1928 and especially during the Reichstag election of September 1930 , in which the NSDAP achieved a breakthrough with 27.6% of the votes in Oldenburg. In the spring of 1931 he therefore anonymously published a brochure entitled Citizens and Farmer, Awake! which contained critical material about National Socialism and its leading men. Numerous right-wing protests against the publication prove its effectiveness, but the fall of the Weimar Republic could not be stopped. Before the March election in 1933 , Tantzen and Hermann Dietrich, now chairman of the state party, made one last attempt to enter into a list connection with the SPD. The list connection was still established, but the election was clearly lost in favor of the NSDAP.

After the seizure of power , Tantzen had to give up all political activity and retired to his court. As an opponent of National Socialism , he was imprisoned at the beginning of the Second World War from September 1 to 20, 1939. Since he had been named by the conspirators of July 20, 1944 as subcontractor in Military District X (Hamburg) , he was arrested again the day after the failed assassination attempt in Bremen and then held in various prisons and in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Among other things, he was in the Tegel prison and in the Lehrter Strasse prison in Berlin. He was released on December 10, 1944. He was arrested again on April 20, 1945 and was released five days later from Nordenham Judicial Prison .

After the Second World War

After the Second World War he joined the Union of Free Democrats of Germany founded by his son Theodor in 1945 . This joined the FDP in the British zone of occupation in 1946 .

The British military government was Tantzen known as the former Prime Minister of Oldenburg and so they named him already on 16 May 1945 provisional prime minister of the first restored country Oldenburg. As after the First World War, Tantzen was again at the head of the Oldenburg government after a lost war. He represented the positions of the Atlantic and advocated a political union of central and western European states based on common convictions and values. He campaigned uncompromisingly for the persecution and condemnation of those primarily responsible for the National Socialist rule and, in the interests of his nephew Karl Jaspers, represented his theses on the question of German guilt.

Politically, Tantzen sought renewed independence for the state of Oldenburg within a German state and thus countered the plans of the later first Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf, to unite Oldenburg with Hanover, Schaumburg-Lippe and Braunschweig. The British occupying power finally took up Kopf's proposal. Tantzen subsequently joined the first Lower Saxony government of Prime Minister Kopf as Transport Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. On November 6, 1946, as Prime Minister of Oldenburg, he gave the last speech in the Oldenburg state parliament.

Theodor Tantzen died on January 11, 1947 as a result of a stroke in his office in Oldenburg. His body was first buried on his farm, but in the 1955 cemetery reburied in Abbehausen. His estate is in the Lower Saxony State Archives , Oldenburg .

MP

Theodor Tantzen was a member of the Oldenburg State Parliament of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg from 1911 to 1919. From 1923 to 1928 he was a member of the state parliament in the Free State of Oldenburg and from January to 1946 in the appointed state parliament .

From January to October 1919 Tantzen was a member of the Weimar National Assembly , and from May 1928 to May 1930 he was a member of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic.

State Offices

From 1919 to 1923 and from 1945 to 1946 he was Prime Minister of the Free State of Oldenburg. From 1946 until his death in 1947 he was Minister of Transport for Lower Saxony.

Honors

In 1953, the square at the former state parliament building and state ministry in Oldenburg was named after him. He is considered the most important democratic politician that the state of Oldenburg has produced.

See also

literature

  • Hans FW Gringmuth, Lothar Albertin , Karl Dietrich Bracher and others: Political liberalism in the British zone of occupation 1946–1948: Leadership bodies and politics of the FDP. ( Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties ), Düsseldorf 1995.
  • Martina Neumann: Theodor Tantzen. A stubborn liberal against National Socialism. Publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen 39; Lower Saxony 1933-1945, Volume 8. (also dissertation.) Hahn, Hannover 1998, 462 pages, ISBN 3-7752-5835-3 .
  • Eilert Tantzen : 700 years of chronicle of the Tantzen family. 1300-2000. Published by the Hergen Tantzen family association. Isensee, Oldenburg 1997, 446 pages, ISBN 3-89598-425-6 .
  • Theodor Tantzen. 1877-1947. Commemorative publication on the occasion of his 100th birthday on June 14, 1977. Friedrich Naumann Foundation Bonn, Hanover State Office. Isensee, Oldenburg 1977, 51 pages, ISBN 3-920557-23-9 .
  • Albrecht Eckhardt: From the bourgeois revolution to the National Socialist takeover - the Oldenburg state parliament and its representatives 1848–1933. 1996, ISBN 3-89598-327-6 , p. 109.
  • Wolfgang Günther: Tantzen, Theodor Johann. In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg . Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , pp. 730-735 ( digitized version (PDF; 5.62 MB)).
  • Karl-Heinz Hense : Liberal and Democrat from the very beginning - On the 50th anniversary of Theodor Tantzen's death In: Courage - Forum for Culture, Politics and History No. 353, Asendorf January 1997, pp. 70–77.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. NLA OL Dep 71 - Arcinsys detail page. Retrieved November 16, 2017 .
  2. Gringmuth: Politischer Liberalismus, p. 122
  3. Theodor - Tantzen - 8th place ... a house with history! Police Headquarters Oldenburg.
  4. ^ Wolfgang Günther: Tantzen, Theodor Johann. In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg. Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , p. 734 ( digital version (PDF; 5.62 MB)).