Werner Zwingmann

Werner Zwingmann (* 1946 in Wiedensahl ) is a German veterinarian and was ministerial director in the Federal Ministry for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture .

Life

Werner Zwingmann studied veterinary medicine from 1967 to 1972 at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover . The following year he received his doctorate there with the dissertation Topography and Histology of the urinary and urinary system of the kidney of the domestic chicken . In the following two years he worked as an assistant doctor in a large animal practice. From 1975 he was a civil servant . In the first four years he worked at the veterinary office in Gummersbach and then with the promotion to the regional veterinary council as a department head at the regional council of Cologne . In 1983 he moved to the Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Agriculture, Nature and Consumer Protection of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf, where he was appointed Ministerial Councilor in 1987. From 1994 to 1998 he was head of a project group to coordinate animal disease control at the national and European level at the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture . In the following years until his retirement in 2009, Zwingmann was head of various sub-departments of the ministry. In 2000 he was appointed ministerial director and honorary professor at the TiHo Hanover.

Zwingmann was a member of the board of trustees of the Heinz Lohmann Foundation from 1996 to 2009 . Since 2010 he has been chairman of the board of trustees of Tönnies-Forschung, founded this year - non-profit society for the promotion of research on the future of animal welfare in livestock husbandry . He goes hunting in his free time and was a volunteer member of the CDU in his home town of Gummersbach .

Controversy

In 2002, Zwingmann was transferred as a punishment by the then Minister Renate Künast , who accused him of failure. He was fully rehabilitated by the Düsseldorf Administrative Court in a disciplinary procedure that he himself applied for. The fact that he was not active again in the area of animal disease control as a result of the penalty transfer was occasionally criticized.

In the context of this scandal, he was referred to in Focus as a farmers lobbyist who had part in the resignation of former ministers Karl-Heinz Funke and Andrea Fischer . He had already been described as a farmer's lobbyist in a Spiegel article in the first known case of BSE in Germany at the beginning of 2001.