Werner Jöhren

Werner Jöhren (born September 1, 1900 in Guben , Niederlausitz; † June 26, 1959 in Bad Salzschlirf ) was a German politician, writer and publisher.

Life

Werner Jöhren attended the humanistic grammar school, learned masonry and carpentry, completed the building trade school and then worked as an architect in his father Heinrich Jörgen's business. Jöhren began to work as a writer around 1930, and in 1933 he founded a publishing company in Berlin, Ost-West-Verlag . After the bombing, Jöhren outsourced the publishing house to Heringsdorf (Usedom). Werner Jöhren was politically involved in the main action committee of the German State Party , the successor party to the DDP .

After the end of the war in May 1945, Jöhren took over the management of the Office for Culture and Public Education on Usedom . He was a co-founder of the CDU on the island and its first district chairman. When the CDU won the district elections in autumn 1946, Jöhren became district administrator. At the same time he took over the office of parliamentary group leader of the CDU in the state parliament of Mecklenburg . There he worked in the main committee and was chairman of the constitutional committee. Jöhren is one of the supporters of the SBZ CDU chairman Jakob Kaiser . Like the latter, he rejected the People's Congress movement and thereby came into conflict with the SED and the Soviet occupying power. During the Kaiser crisis he was forbidden to leave the island. At the end of December, the SED conducted a public campaign to expel him from the district office. SED employees went over to open obstruction, the Soviet district commander withdrew his political confidence. Jöhren therefore resigned as district administrator on January 9, 1948.

Further suspicions of the SMA , the organization of an opposition movement and a house search from April 28 to 29, 1948 forced him to leave Usedom. He initially retained his mandate in the state parliament. Werner Jöhren moved to West Berlin (Tempelhof).

He quickly took on other political functions (local group chairman, district chairman) and helped CDU zone refugees. Due to his contacts with Jakob Kaiser, he worked in his West Berlin office in July 1949, which was soon called the Ostreferat or Ostbüro of the CDU . Two months later he was already head of the office. Jakob Kaiser - meanwhile Minister for All-German Issues in Adenauer 's first cabinet - covertly subsidized the office. It was supposed to keep in contact with the CDU members of the SBZ / GDR, collect information about the situation and look after refugees. As a result, the Eastern Office came into the sights of the Soviet secret service and the state security . Jöhren headed the office until his death.

literature

• Wolfgang Buschfort : Parties in the Cold War. The east offices of the SPD, CDU and FDP. Links, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86153-226-3 , ( Federal Commissioner for the Documents of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic, Analyzes and Documents 19).
• Marko Michels: Targeted by the new rulers. A memory of Werner Jöhren, former district administrator on Usedom and parliamentary group chairman in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state parliament. In: Mecklenburg 8/2001, p. 19.
• Christian Schwießelmann: North German, Protestant, liberal - the founding personalities of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen 13, 2006, ISSN  0943-691X , p. 25ff.

swell

• Archive for Christian Democratic Politics, Werner Jöhren estate, 01-350.