Walter Becher

Walter Becher (born October 1, 1912 in Karlsbad , Austria-Hungary ; † August 25, 2005 in Pullach ) was a Sudeten German journalist and politician ( German Community , GB / BHE , GDP , CSU ). After 1945 he was one of the leading representatives and lobbyists of the Sudeten Germans and expellees .

Life

Walter Becher comes from a family of manufacturers in Carlsbad who had been based there since 1530. Their most important product was the "Karlsbader Becherbitter", which is now sold under the name " Becherovka ".

After graduating from high school , Becher studied political science at the University of Vienna from 1931 to 1936 , did his doctorate in 1936 with Othmar Spann and then worked as a journalist. During his studies he had joined the German Guild . Becher polemicized in the ČSR with public speeches for the integration of the Sudetenland into the National Socialist German Reich . In 1938 he became an employee of the NSDAP district organ for the Sudetenland, Die Zeit , where he was responsible as an editor for the fields of art, science and entertainment. In 1939/40 he was imprisoned for six months in Dresden as part of the trials against members of the Sudeten German Spann-Kreis . From 1940 he took part as a soldier in the Second World War, from 1942 for a time as 2nd editor in the propaganda train PK 697 under the direction of Kurt Joachim Fischer and at the end of the war he became an American prisoner of war.

After his release from captivity, Becher initially returned to the Sudetenland, but fled to Bavaria in 1945 , where he was involved in the movement of expellees. In July 1945 he was one of the initiators of the Sudeten German Aid Agency , which saw itself as the core of a new "Sudeten German ethnic group leadership" and was dissolved by the US military government only a year later . In 1947 he took part in the founding of the Sudeten German Council , of which he was Secretary General until 1982. From 1956 to 1958 he was chairman of the Witikobund . In 1959, Becher initiated the committee to protect citizens against defamation by the left-wing press. He was also deputy chairman until 1968 and then chairman until 1982 of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft .

In the state elections in 1950 , Becher was elected to the Bavarian state parliament on the list of German community bloc of expellees and disenfranchised , an electoral alliance of DG (6 seats) and BHE (20 seats) and initially deputy chairman of the DG parliamentary group. From 1954 until he left the state parliament in 1962, he was chairman of the GB / BHE parliamentary group.

Due to the electoral alliances of the GDP for the 1965 Bundestag election with the CDU , CSU and SPD , Becher came to the German Bundestag via the CSU state list , to which he belonged until 1980. In the Bundestag he made a name for himself as a strict opponent of the social-liberal coalition's Ostpolitik .

Becher was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit in 1962 and the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972 . In 1983 he received the European Charlemagne Prize of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft for special services to the right to self-determination and international understanding .

In 1969 the GDR directors Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann made a documentary about him under the title The President in Exile .

His son Peter Becher is a social democrat and managing director of the Adalbert Stifter Verein .

Party affiliation

Becher was initially a member of the "Comradeship Association, Association for Education as a Whole Society", which was organized by Walter Heinrich in line with the teachings of Othmar Spann . Like many other members of the Kameradschaftsbund, including Konrad Henlein and Walter Brand , Becher joined the newly founded Sudeten German Homeland Movement in 1933, later the Sudeten German Party . Entry into the NSDAP , which Becher denies, is documented on December 12, 1931 ( membership number 896.129). His membership application from 1938 was rejected in 1940.

After the Second World War , Becher helped found the German Community (Germany) . Shortly before the state elections in 1954 , he joined the BHE. On October 8, 1957, as parliamentary group leader of the GB / BHE, he announced that it would leave the coalition of four and led the party into a government coalition with the CSU under Hanns Seidel . In 1959 he tried to found the National Democratic Union (NDU), a conservative collection movement in which only the BHE and the Witikobund and a few smaller organizations took part. Attempts to win over the DG and the FDP also failed. Through the merger of the BHE with the German Party , he became a member of the All- German Party in 1961 . When it lost its parliamentary representation in Bavaria in 1962, he negotiated unsuccessfully with the FDP to convert. In 1967 he joined the CSU.

Fonts

• Contemporary witness. A life report , Munich 1990.

literature

• K. Erik Franzen: The fourth tribe of Bavaria. Patronage over the Sudeten Germans 1954–1974. Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-59150-7 .
• Eva Hahn, Hans Henning Hahn : The expulsion in German memory. Legends, myths, history . Schöningh, Paderborn 2010.
• Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 1: A-M. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , p. 47.
• Who was "Dr. WB "? In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1959, pp. 27 f . ( online - June 3, 1959 ).
• Mandate and dynamite . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1964, pp. 59-61 ( Online - Oct. 28, 1964 ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Becher in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Therese Angeloff: My soul has a wooden leg. Damnitz-Verlag, 1982, p. 14.
2. ^ K. Erik Franzen: The fourth tribe of Bavaria. Patronage over the Sudeten Germans 1954–1974. Munich 2010, pp. 393, 501; Mug: contemporary witness. P. 326ff.