Walter Seuffert

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Walter Seuffert (born February 4, 1907 in Rahway , New Jersey ; † December 28, 1989 in Munich ) was a German lawyer and politician of the SPD .

Family and origin

Seuffert was born to Catholic German parents from Würzburg in Rahway, New Jersey, USA. His father Otto Seuffert (1875–1952) was there from 1904 to 1911 as a chemist at MSD Sharp & Dohme , his mother Anna nee. Leibold was a housewife. His paternal grandfather, Lothar von Seuffert, was a law professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , and the organ builder Johann Philipp Seuffert is also one of his ancestors. In 1911 the family returned to Germany.

education and profession

Seuffert grew up in Darmstadt and attended elementary school and secondary school there. After studying law from 1925 in Heidelberg, Frankfurt / Main and Munich and completing his legal traineeship, he passed his assessor examination in Munich in 1932, where he was admitted to the bar. He then settled in Munich in 1932 as a lawyer and specialist lawyer for tax law and from 1933 ran a law firm together with the later mayor of Munich, Walther von Miller . Seuffert specialized in advising Jewish emigrants. He made trips abroad, including to Ludwig Quidde in Geneva. In 1940 the Gestapo arrested Seuffert and accused him of high treason . Seuffert remained in custody for four weeks and was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941.

After taking part in the war and being a prisoner of war, he resumed his work as a lawyer in 1946, but after a short time he held the position of advisor to the Bavarian State Chancellery.

politics

In 1947 Seuffert joined the SPD and was appointed to the Economic Council for the United Economic Area in 1948 .

From his first election in 1949 until his resignation on October 18, 1967, i.e. five terms, he was a member of the German Bundestag . He was elected directly in the constituency of Munich-North in 1949 and 1965, and otherwise through the SPD state list in Bavaria .

On February 24, 1950, he was excluded from a session by Bundestag President Erich Köhler for unparliamentary behavior after he declared in a plenary debate on changes to the Income Tax Act: “The German name has nothing to do with the intentions of this government and the majority of this Bundestag . The German name is represented elsewhere ”.

From 1949 to 1957 Seuffert was deputy chairman of the Bundestag committee for money and credit, then until 1961 of the finance committee.

Seuffert gained greater fame through his much-cited exchange of blows in the Bundestag on November 7, 1962 with Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on the Spiegel affair . When Adenauer asserted “We have an abyss of treason in the country” in response to the still unresolved allegations, Seuffert intervened “Who said that?”, Adenauer simply replied “I say that” and Seuffert added “Is this a pending case or not?” .

From June 4, 1964 to October 13, 1967 he was also a member of the European Parliament .

On October 18, 1967, he was elected Vice-President of the Federal Constitutional Court , whose second Senate he chaired until he retired in November 1975.

Works

  • On the basics of the concept of the political party. In: Theodor Eschenburg , Theodor Heuss , Georg August Zinn (eds.): Festgabe for Carlo Schmid for his 65th birthday. Mohr, Tübingen 1962.
  • The delimitation of the activities of the Federal Constitutional Court in relation to legislation and case law. In: New legal weekly. 1969, issue 32, - pp. 1369-1373.
  • About secret votes and elections in parliaments. Lower Saxony. State Parliament, Hanover 1978.

Awards

literature

  • Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 235ff.
  • Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 2: N-Z. Attachment. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , pp. 817-818.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Walter Seuffert was born on February 4, 1907  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the archive of social democracy@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.fes.de  
  2. In the year of devotion . The mirror. March 2, 1950. Retrieved June 19, 2017.
  3. Where is the Federal Republic going? . The mirror. April 25, 1966. Retrieved June 19, 2017.