Werner Stephan

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Werner Stephan (born August 15, 1895 in Altona , † July 4, 1984 in Bad Godesberg , Bonn ) was a German politician . He was Reich Managing Director of the DDP , Federal Managing Director of the FDP and the first managing director of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation .

Life

Stephan attended the Royal Christianeum until he graduated from high school in 1913 . After completing his studies in economics in Tübingen and Hamburg , military service and imprisonment, Stephan was Reich Director of the DDP from 1922 to 1929 . In 1926 he married his wife Else and the couple had two sons. His candidacy for a member of the Prussian state parliament narrowly failed in 1927. In addition to his work in the DDP, he completed a journalistic training. In the spring of 1929 he joined the press department of the Reich government, where he initially worked for Gustav Stresemann . As a commission from his friend Theodor Tantzen , he anonymously wrote an anti-Nazi brochure entitled Citizens and Farmer Awake . His older sister Luise had been married to the Jew Friedrich Solmitz since 1925. Nevertheless, she was an enthusiastic Hitler supporter. It was only when her husband and daughter were discriminated against and threatened by the Nazi regime that she turned away from the Nazi ideology.

During the National Socialist era , Stephan headed the NSDAP's press chief, Otto Dietrich , as the representative of its Berlin office, which from August 1939 was assigned the newly created press office for verbal reporting by the Propaganda Companies (PK). Stephan had to monitor the PK reports objectively and to ensure their dissemination. and was head of the domestic press department and ministerial advisor in the Reich Ministry of Propaganda . In 1938 he joined the NSDAP . During the Second World War he was a specialist examiner for press matters at the Wehrmacht High Command and was responsible for propaganda, where he held the rank of first lieutenant of the infantry .

After the Second World War , among others, Theodor Heuss campaigned for Stephan's denazification . Stephan was from 1951 to 1953 managing director of the donation of thanks of the German people , then from 1953 to 1955 press officer at the German Research Foundation .

From March 15, 1955 to May 15, 1959, Stephan was Lothar Weirauch's successor as federal manager of the FDP, after which, as its first managing director, he played a key role in establishing the Friedrich Naumann Foundation . From 1964 to 1982 he was a member of the board of directors and an honorary member of the board until his death in 1984. In 1983 he published his memoirs under the title Eight Decades of Germany. A liberal in four eras . In it he openly admitted his involvement in the Nazi regime: "... that I knew all the terrible things and still stayed [...] because I felt like a German and didn't want to leave the country".

In addition to numerous other honors, Stephan was the recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit and the Wolf-Erich-Kellner Prize of the Wolf-Erich-Kellner Memorial Foundation . Later he was a member of their board of trustees. From 1966 to 1967 he was chairman of the Society of Friends and Patrons of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation . Since 1913 he was a member of the Tübingen fraternity Derendingia .

Documents and files on Stephen's political activities can be found in the archive of liberalism of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Gummersbach .

Fonts

  • Joseph Goebbels. Demon of a dictatorship. Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1949.
  • with Heinrich Tintner (Ed.): Sender Germany. The report on the donation of thanks by the German people. Gebrüder Mann Verlag, Berlin 1955, OCLC 4844670 .
  • History of German Liberalism. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1966 (together with Hans Reif and Friedrich Henning); 2nd edition, 1976.
  • The rise and decline of left-wing liberalism 1918–1933. The history of the German Democratic Party. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973, ISBN 3-525-36160-2 .
  • Germany experienced eight decades. A liberal in four eras. Droste, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-7700-0632-1 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank Bajohr , Beate Meyer, Joachim Szodrynski (eds.): Threat, hope, skepticism. Four diaries from 1933. Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1365-1 , p. 128.
  2. ↑ a b Willi A. Boelcke (Ed.): War Propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. 1966, p. 67 f.
  3. ↑ a b Frank Bajohr u. a. (Ed.): Threat, Hope, Skepticism. Four diaries from 1933. Göttingen 2013, p. 131.
  4. ↑ Beate Meyer: Between enthusiasm and skepticism - The transformation of Luise Solmitz in the mirror of her diaries. In: Frank Bajohr u. a. (Ed.): Threat, Hope, Skepticism. Four diaries from 1933. A publication by the Institute for the History of German Jews and the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg . Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1365-1 , pp. 127–142, here: pp. 130 ff.
  5. ↑ a b c d Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 591.
  6. ↑ Werner Stephan. Website on 50 years of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. In: 50jahre.freiheit.org, accessed on February 1, 2019.
  7. ↑ Quoting from Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 591.
  8. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , p. 514.
personal data
SURNAME Stephan, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Altona
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1984
Place of death bad Godesberg