Thomas Dehler

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the actor of the same name, see Thomas Dehler (actor) .

Thomas Dehler (1964)

Bundestag Vice President Dehler (left) receives the President of the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe , Curt C. Silberman in 1967 .

Thomas Dehler (born December 14, 1897 in Lichtenfels , † July 21, 1967 in Streitberg , Ebermannstadt district ) was a German politician ( DDP and FDP ). From 1949 to 1953 he was Federal Minister of Justice and from 1954 to 1957 Federal Chairman of the FDP.

Life and work

After graduating from high school in 1916, Dehler took part in the First World War as a soldier . He then began studying medicine, which he broke off after three semesters to instead study law and political science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg and in Würzburg , which he did Graduated from the first state examination in 1920 and the second state examination in 1923 . In 1920 he was awarded a doctorate in law in Würzburg with his work The Justification of the Criminal Judgment . Dehler was a member of various republican student associations, including the Südmark-Monachia (Munich) in the Burschenbunds-Convent . From 1924 he was admitted to the bar in Munich and from 1925 in Bamberg. Even during the global economic crisis , Dehler earned an above-average income as a lawyer.

Thomas Dehler was married to Irma Frank since 1925. The marriage was classified as " mixed marriage " under the Nuremberg Laws during the Nazi era . Since Thomas Dehler was considered to be of German blood within the Nazi categories and there were already descendants, the marriage was classified as privileged mixed marriages. However, Irma Dehler's relatives were deported in 1941 . Through research, Dehler received the information that there was little hope that the deportees would survive. During this time, the Dehler family considered emigration, which was no longer feasible. Despite considerable pressure from the National Socialists and the Nazi-dominated Bar Association , Dehler not only held on to his marriage and his Jewish clients, he also took on mandates from opponents of the regime . In the striker he was then denigrated as a “ real fellow Jew ”.

Dehler's economic situation fluctuated during the Nazi era. At times, however, Dehler was still one of the top earners among lawyers in the Reich. In 1938 and 1939 in particular, representing the interests of Germans persecuted as Jews as part of so-called Aryanization measures resulted in financially rewarding tasks. He pursued the resulting obligations honestly in the interests of the clients, especially since, in return, state and corporate bodies of the Nazi state tried several times unsuccessfully to recruit him because of his litigation and the like. a. to prosecute for gross mischief, perversion of the law or breach of duty.

Dehler belonged to the Robinsohn-Strassmann group from the mid-1930s .

In the Second World War Dehler was initially a soldier again, but was expelled from the Wehrmacht as "unworthy of defense " after nine months because of his Jewish wife . There was initially no professional restriction. In March 1943 he was classified as “dispensable” for the administration of justice and released for the war economy . As a result, from November 1944 he was forced to work as a construction clerk in the Schelditz camp near Rositz by the Todt organization . Thomas Dehler had previously been arrested for a short time at the end of 1938 as a result of the Reichspogromnacht . The fact that he was able to parry many Nazi-motivated accusations aimed at him can probably also be explained by the fact that before 1933 he had many contacts in the Bamberg citizenship and had acquired a good reputation among the judges and prosecutors there.

From 1945 to 1947 he was Attorney General at the Higher Regional Court in Bamberg , from 1946 also Prosecutor General at the Court of Cassation at the Bavarian State Ministry for Special Tasks ( denazification ). From 1947 to 1949 he was President of the Bamberg Higher Regional Court.

As early as 1926, Dehler was accepted into the Masonic lodge Zur Fraternization on the Regnitz in Bamberg . After it was banned during the Nazi era, he was one of the founders of the lodge again in 1946, to which he belonged until his death in 1967.

In 1923 Dehler was one of the founders of the boys' union Südmark Monachia in Munich. In 1948 he joined the Humanitas Würzburg student union as an old man . This went up in the Alemannia Makaria Würzburg country team in the CC , and Dehler gave the keynote address at the 1959 Pentecost Congress.

From 1959 to 1967 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation .

Thomas Dehler died of heart failure in the Streitberg open-air swimming pool. His political legacy is in the archive of liberalism of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Gummersbach , the museum part in the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn .

Political party

From 1920 until its self-dissolution after pressure from the National Socialists in 1933, Dehler was a member of the German Democratic Party (or from 1930: German State Party). Since 1926 he was chairman of the Bamberg district association of his party. In 1924 he was a co-founder of the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold combat organization, which supported the republic .

After the end of the Second World War, Dehler and Fritz Linnert were among the co-founders of the FDP Bavaria , of which he was state chairman from 1946 to 1956 and when in 1954 he made a significant contribution to the formation of the only Bavarian state government without CSU participation. At the founding party convention of the Federal FDP in Heppenheim in 1948, he was elected to the party executive.

Within the FDP, Dehler, like Reinhold Maier (Württemberg-Baden), Hans Reif (Berlin) and Willy Max Rademacher (Hamburg), belonged to the group of determined liberals who spoke out against a course of the National Collection, such as that of the State chairmen Friedrich Middelhauve (North Rhine-Westphalia), August-Martin Euler (Hesse) and Artur Stegner (Lower Saxony) was persecuted. Instead, Dehler and his political friends saw the FDP's place in the political middle between the SPD and the Union parties. After the federal election in 1949, for example, he spoke out against a joint parliamentary group with the DP , as demanded by the right wing of the party.

Together with Alfred Onnen and Fritz Neumayer, Thomas Dehler formed the party's internal commission to investigate the Naumann-Kreis affair .

In 1954 he was elected federal chairman of the FDP. He held this office until 1957.

MP

As Vice-President of the Bundestag, Dehler (right) receives the Speaker of Parliament from Mali Alassane Haidara (center) in 1966 .

In 1946 Dehler was a member of the constituent state assembly in Bavaria and from 1946 to 1949 of the Bavarian state parliament .

From 1947 to 1948 he was a member of the State Council of the American Occupation Area and from 1948 to 1949 of the Parliamentary Council .

From 1949 until his death Dehler was a member of the German Bundestag , to which he was always elected via the Bavarian state list of the FDP and where he was chairman of the FDP parliamentary group from 1953 to 1957 . On February 23, 1956, the FDP parliamentary group decided under his leadership to terminate the coalition with the CDU / CSU . Thereupon 16 members, including the four FDP federal ministers, left the parliamentary group and founded the Free People's Party (FVP).

From 1957 to 1961 Dehler headed the foreign policy and defense working group of the FDP parliamentary group and was also chairman of the parliamentary committee for nuclear energy and water management.

He was Vice President of the German Bundestag from September 28, 1960, when he succeeded the late Max Becker , until his death . In 1960/61 he represented the Bundestag before the Federal Constitutional Court in the proceedings on the application of the Bavarian state government to declare the nullity of the "Law on the Keeping of Federal Waterways Clean of August 17, 1960" .

Since June 19, 1963, he was also chairman of the electoral committee under Section 6 of the Act on the Federal Constitutional Court .

In the statute of limitations debate in the Bundestag on March 10, 1965, Dehler pleaded on the basis of constitutional considerations for the imminent statute of limitations for unpunished murders, especially those of National Socialist perpetrators . With this in mind, he declared in the Bundestag in 1965: “Our right also includes guilt, that every guilt expires”.

Public offices

From June 1945 to 1946 he was appointed district administrator of the Bamberg district by the US military government .

After the federal election in 1949 , he was appointed Federal Minister of Justice on September 20, 1949 in the federal government led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer .

Among the first under the Federal Justice Minister Dehler published federal laws include the impunity law . This amnestied most of the crimes that had been committed before September 15, 1949 and were threatened with arrest of a maximum of one year or a fine of up to 10,000 marks. Despite some reservations about this law, he ultimately assessed the measure as suitable for "detoxifying" political life in the Federal Republic. General stepped Dehler for a final stroke one in the legal sense in relation to the period of National Socialism. Among other things, he worked out a party convention resolution of the federal FDP in 1949 to end denazification. The implementing legislation to Art. 131  GG, supported by Dehler, made it possible for many former civil servants who had been removed from service after 1945 because of their party membership in the NSDAP to be reinstated or provided for under civil service law from 1951 onwards. Even if Dehler advocated not forgetting the crimes of the National Socialists, he still considered it reasonable in domestic politics to amnesty their functionaries. In this respect, he took a partially provocative position vis-à-vis the former war opponents by advocating a general and satisfactory forgiveness and forgetting on the war criminals question . Corresponding public statements on his part led to a protest by the French High Commissioner at Adenauer in 1950 .

In the Bundestag election campaign in 1953 , he spoke out with the FDP against the reintroduction of the death penalty, in contrast to the coalition partners CDU / CSU and DP .

After the federal election in 1953, he was not reappointed to the federal government because of serious differences with Konrad Adenauer , from which he therefore resigned on October 20, 1953.

When the second Adenauer government was formed in 1953, Federal President Heuss rejected Dehler's reappointment as Minister of Justice because of his behavior towards the Federal Constitutional Court. Adenauer then withdrew his proposal.

Honors

• The Thomas Dehler Foundation , which is close to the Bavarian FDP. The foundation awards the Thomas Dehler Prize every year .
• The federal party headquarters of the FDP resided in the Thomas-Dehler-Haus in Bonn until 1999 , and the new federal office in Berlin was also called the Thomas-Dehler-Haus until 2017.
• The Thomas Dehler Library in Martin-Luther-Str. 77 in 10825 Berlin-Schöneberg
• Thomas-Dehler-Strasse in Munich- Neuperlach
• Honorary citizen of the city of Lichtenfels
• 1961: Bavarian Order of Merit
• 1964: Wolfgang Döring Medal

Works

• The justification of the criminal judgment , jur. Dissertation, Würzburg 1920.
• The development of the right in the Soviet zone of occupation , Federation of German Industries, Cologne 1952.
• The parliament in the change of the state idea . In: Power and Powerlessness of Parliaments . Stuttgart 1965, p. 9 ff .
• Praise to Franconia. A confession , Glock u. Lutz, Nuremberg 1967.
• Parliament and the press . In: Zeitungsverlag and Zeitschriften-Verlag , 1965, issue 43/44, p. 1990 f.
• Speeches and essays , Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne 1969.

literature

• Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , revised and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 68 f.
• House of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany (Ed.): Thomas Dehler and his politics . Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87584-721-0 .
• Wolfram Dorn , Friedrich Henning (Ed.): Thomas Dehler. Encounters - thoughts - decisions. Liberal-Verlag, Bonn 1978, DNB 780247493 .
• Thomas Hertfelder , Jürgen C. Heß (ed.): Disputes about the state fragment. Theodor Heuss and Thomas Dehler report on the creation of the Basic Law . DVA, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-421-05220-4 .
• Hermann Maassen , Elmar Hucko: Thomas Dehler, the first Federal Minister of Justice. Federal Gazette, Cologne 1977, DNB 780121511 .
• Gabriel Ott: Thomas Dehler. Oberfränkische Verlagsanstalt, Hof 1985, ISBN 3-921615-60-7 .
• Udo Wengst : Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography. Oldenbourg, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-486-56306-8 .
• Matthias Stickler : Thomas Dehler (1897–1967) as a corporation student - comments on a topic that has received little attention up to now . In: Oliver Mohr (Ed.): 150 Years Coburger Convent , Würzburg 2018, pp. 345–367, ISBN 3-930877-51-1 .

Web links

Commons : Thomas Dehler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Thomas Dehler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Thomas Dehler  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about Thomas Dehler in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Dehler's estate in the archive of liberalism of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Gummersbach
• Speech in the German Bundestag on the reintroduction of the death penalty on October 2, 1952

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Evidence in Dehler's estate in the Archive of Liberalism (ADL), NL Dehler, N53–64 and N53–66, Gummersbach.
2. ^ Kurt Naumann: Directory of the members of the old gentlemen's association of BC Munich e. V. and all other former BCers as well as the old men of the Wiener SC . Saarbrücken, Christmas 1962, p. 10.
3. ↑ See Udo Wengst: Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography , Munich 1997, p. 53.
4. ↑ See Udo Wengst: Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography , Munich 1997, p. 66 ff.
5. ↑ See Udo Wengst: Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography , Munich 1997, p. 59 ff.
6. ^ Wolfgang Benz : Resistance of traditional elites . In: Federal Center for Political Education (Ed.): German Resistance 1933–1945 , Issue 243, Munich 1994.
7. ↑ See Udo Wengst: Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography , Munich 1997, pp. 60 ff. And pp. 73 f.
8. ↑ Thomas Dehler biography . Website of the LeMO (Living Virtual Museum Online) . Retrieved November 18, 2010.
9. ^ Udo Wengst : Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-486-56306-8 , p. 36.
10. ↑ Heinz Kraus. In: CC-Blätter 82 (1967), p. 188 ff.
11. ↑ Thomas Dehler was a regular at the outdoor pool . in: Franconia . March 17, 2011. Retrieved August 9, 2017.
12. ↑ See Udo Wengst: Thomas Dehler 1897–1967. A political biography , Munich 1997, p. 53.
13. ↑ What can the President do? . Time online. Retrieved August 9, 2017.
14. ↑ At Café Raab, Lichtenfels, Marktplatz 9, a plaque reminds us that this is where he was born.