Walter Simons

Walter Simons, September 1931

Walter Simons (born September 24, 1861 in Elberfeld (now part of Wuppertal ); † July 14, 1937 in Nowawes near Potsdam ) was a German lawyer and politician . After he had been a member of the Reich government as Foreign Minister, he served as President of the Reich Court from 1922 to 1929 . In 1925, after the death of Friedrich Ebert, he took over the business of the Reich President on a temporary basis .

Life

Walter Simons was born as the son of the factory owner Louis Simons (1831–1905) and his wife Helene. Kyllmann (* 1842) born in Elberfeld ( Rhine Province ). On his mother's side, he was the grandson of the businessman and politician Gottlieb Kyllmann (1803–1878) and nephew of the architect Walter Kyllmann (1837–1913). On his father's side, he was the grandson of the entrepreneur Friedrich Wilhelm Simons-Köhler (1802-1856) and the great-nephew of the Prussian Justice Minister Ludwig Simons (1803-1870). He was a student of the lawyer Rudolph Sohm , educated by humanism and shaped by Lutheran Pietism .

After studying history, philosophy, law and economics in Strasbourg , Leipzig and Bonn , he began his legal career in 1882 as a trainee lawyer and in 1893 became the first district judge in Velbert . After positions at the Reich Justice Office in 1905 and at the Foreign Office in 1911, Simons became head of the Reich Chancellery in October 1918 . As such, he took part in the negotiations for the peace of Bucharest with Romania and the peace of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia . On October 4, 1918, Reich Chancellor Max von Baden brought Simons to the Reich Chancellery as his personal confidante with the rank of Ministerial Director. From here, Simons announced on November 9, 1918 that Kaiser Wilhelm II had renounced the throne. With this untruthful announcement, Simons wanted to forestall the proclamation of the republic in Germany and save the monarchy, which failed.

In December 1918, Simons moved to the legal department of the Foreign Office . In this function he was Secretary General of the German peace delegation in Versailles and resigned because he rejected the Treaty of Versailles . 1919/1920 Simons was the managing director of the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie .

From June 25, 1920 to May 4, 1921, Walter Simons was Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic in the Fehrenbach cabinet , a government coalition made up of the center , DDP and DVP . The historian Hans Mommsen saw the appointment of the independent career lawyer Simons as an attempt to keep foreign policy free from domestic political considerations of the Reichstag during the difficult reparation negotiations with the victorious powers. This was only partially successful. Simons represented Germany at the Spa Conference in July 1920. Although the Germans did not succeed in lowering the reparations claims of the victorious powers, they were at least allowed to send their own representatives to the subsequent expert consultations. The time of one-sided dictation seemed over. Simons contributed to this partial success with his authoritative manner: he was able to soften the "bad impression" ( Peter Krüger ) that the German expert Hugo Stinnes had left with the victorious powers with a triumphant speech.

At the London Conference in the spring of 1921, the German delegation was defeated, also because it was divided: Simons wanted to accommodate Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Japan on the reparations issue and hoped for an international loan for Germany in return , but the lobbyists did the economy resisted. The plan, which Simons presented on March 1, 1921 under strong domestic political pressure, combined an offer of 50 billion gold marks with a demand for concessions from the victorious powers on the question of war guilt . However, when the latter ultimately demanded a signature under their payment plan, Chancellor Constantin Fehrenbach and Simons refused : They left in protest, which was initially generally hailed in Germany as a gesture of firmness. The result was the occupation of Düsseldorf , Duisburg and Ruhrort by British, French and Belgian troops on March 8, 1921 . Simons' request to mediate with the United States went unheard. On May 4th, the reparations creditors presented the London payment plan, which provided for a German reparation debt of 132 billion gold marks on which interest was to be paid. Simons did not think he could answer for this and resigned with the entire cabinet on the same day. The subsequent Wirth I cabinet accepted the London ultimatum on May 10, 1921.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had described Simons in an interview with the Petit Parisien during the negotiations as "very intelligent and very honest, but not strong enough"; Germany's problem is that after the lost war it has not yet found a “strong man” like Léon Gambetta or Adolphe Thiers . This passage was quoted by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf in 1926 as evidence of the alleged weakness of bourgeois governments that did not decisively oppose Marxism . However, Hitler made two mistakes, because he wrote about the "former Chancellor Simon [sic!]".

Simons was President of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig from 1922 to 1929 , appointed by the Social Democratic Reich President Friedrich Ebert . Ebert died on February 28, 1925; As President of the Reichsgericht, Simons took over the duties of the Reich President on a provisional basis. On May 12, 1925, Paul von Hindenburg was sworn in as the new Reich President. In the run-up to the Reich presidential election in 1925 , Simons was discussed several times as a candidate; However, the considerations of different party constellations did not come to any concrete result.

In November 1926, Simons gave a widely acclaimed lecture on the "crisis of confidence in the German judiciary". In it he turned the allegations of the SPD and DDP against unilaterally right-wing judgments of the Weimar judiciary and spoke about a “crisis in the trust of the judiciary in the German state”, triggered by a personnel policy favoring democrats. He specifically attacked the Republican Judges' Association founded by Hugo Sinzheimer , Robert Kempner , Fritz Bauer and Ernst Fraenkel : According to Simons, social democrats could never be judges due to "internal obstacles" because they were less committed to the law than to the class struggle . Justice Minister Gustav Radbruch (SPD) countered him in the subsequent controversy that the class struggle from above was more damaging than the social democratic class struggle from below because it ran unconsciously and was therefore beyond self-control and self-criticism.

He resigned his office at the Reichsgericht in 1929 in protest against what he believed to be unconstitutional interference by the Reich government in pending proceedings. From 1929 Simons was professor for international law in Leipzig .

Simons was involved in the Franco-German Study Committee , which tried to initiate an understanding between mostly conservative business leaders and politicians. He was also a member of the German Evangelical Church Committee and from 1925 to 1935 President of the Evangelical Social Congress . Simons also represented the Lutheran denomination publicly internationally at the Stockholm Conference in 1925. In January 1932 Simons got involved with several nobles, industrialists and representatives of the political right such as Detlof von Winterfeldt , Adolf Tortilowicz von Batocki-Friebe , Carl Duisberg , Kuno Graf Westarp and Georg Escherich for a renewed candidacy of Hindenburg for the office of Reich President.

Simons made together with Hans von Seeckt and Wilhelm Solf the board of SeSiSo clubs , which in the Berlin Kaiserhof cultural events for the liberal educated bourgeoisie organized, often in cooperation with the German Society in 1914 , whose chairman was Wilhelm Solf. Such a meeting also took place at the time of the transfer of power to Hitler, when Harry Graf Kessler gave a lecture to the club members in the Hotel Kaiserhof. The former members of the SeSiSo Club later formed the resistance group Solf-Kreis to a large extent . In his publications on issues of international law , Simons supported Hitler's foreign policy during the Nazi era, as well as the positions of fascist Italy in the Abyssinian War in 1935 and the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War.

Walter Simons was the father of the lawyer Hans Simons , father-in-law of the constitutional lawyer Ernst Rudolf Huber and grandfather of the theologian Wolfgang Huber . His grave is in the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Stahnsdorf .

Awards and honors

• 1930: Honorary membership of the American Society for International Law
• 1931: Eagle shield of the German Empire
• 1993: The place in front of the Velbert District Court (where he became the first district judge in 1893) was named after him

Simons is the only German whom Nathan Söderblom mentions in his Nobel Prize speech of 1930 as a promoter of peace in his generation.

Works

• Christianity and Crime , Leipzig 1925.
• Religion and Law (Lectures held at Uppsala University ), Berlin-Tempelhof 1936.
• Church people and state people , Leipzig 1937 (= Leipzig legal studies , 100).

literature

• Hellmuth Auerbach: Simons, Walter, Richter . In: Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon zur Weimarer Republik. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 314 f.
• Horst founder : Walter Simons as a statesman, lawyer and church politician . Schmidt, Neustadt an der Aisch 1975 (= Bergische Forschungen , 13).
• Ernst Rudolf Huber : Walter Simons 1861–1937 . In: Wuppertal biographies . 9th episode, Wuppertal 1970 (= contributions to the history and local history of the Wuppertal , 17), pp. 61–79.
• Martin Otto:  Simons, Walter. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , pp. 441-443 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hellmuth Auerbach: Simons, Walter, Richter . In: Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon zur Weimarer Republik. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 314 f.
2. ↑ Hellmuth Auerbach: Simons, Walter, Richter . In: Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon zur Weimarer Republik. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 315 f.
3. ^ Hans Mommsen: Rise and Fall of the Republic of Weimar 1918–1933 . Ullstein, Berlin 1998, p. 119 f.
4. ^ Peter Krüger : The foreign policy of the republic of Weimar. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1985, p. 111.
5. ^ Hagen Schulze : Weimar. Germany 1917–1933 . Siedler, Berlin 1994, p. 227 ff .; Peter Krüger: The foreign policy of the republic of Weimar. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1985, pp. 122-132.
6. ↑ Christian Hartmann , Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger, Roman Töppel (eds.): Hitler, Mein Kampf. A critical edition . Institute for Contemporary History Munich - Berlin, Munich 2016, vol. 2, p. 1716 f.
7. ^ Daniel Siemens: The "crisis of confidence in the judiciary" in the Weimar Republic , In: Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf (eds.): The "crisis" of the Weimar Republic , Campus Verlag , Frankfurt a. M. 2005, p. 154.
8. ^ Gerhard Schulz: From Brüning to Hitler. The change in the political system in Germany 1930–1933 (= between democracy and dictatorship. Constitutional policy and imperial reform in the Weimar Republic. Vol. 3). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1992, p. 907.
9. ^ Gerhard Schulz : From Brüning to Hitler. The change in the political system in Germany 1930–1933 (= between democracy and dictatorship. Constitutional policy and imperial reform in the Weimar Republic. Vol. 3). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1992, p. 725 f.
10. ↑ Eberhard von Vietsch: Wilhelm Solf - Ambassador between the times . Wunderlich Verlag 1961.
11. ↑ Martin Otto: Simons, Walter . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 24 (2010), accessed on July 12, 2017.
12. ^ Website of the Nobel Prize Committee

Web links

Commons : Walter Simons  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Walter Simons in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Walter Simons in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Walter Simons in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
• Genealogy FactGrid Item: Q17814

predecessor	Office	successor
Julius Smend	President of the New Bach Society 1930–1936	Erwin Bumke