Wilhelm Simpfendörfer

Wilhelm Simpfendörfer (born May 25, 1888 in Neustadt an der Haardt (Palatinate) , † May 4, 1973 in Heilbronn ) was a German politician ( CSVD , CDU ).

Life

Announcement poster for Wilhelm Simpfendörfer, 1953

Simpfendörfer grew up in Brettach (today the municipality of Langenbrettach ). After school, he attended the Lichtenstern teacher training college and then became a teacher at the higher boys' school in Korntal , where he was in charge from 1945 to 1952.

As early as 1919 he was politically active as a community representative in Korntal. In 1924 he founded the Protestant Christian Social People's Service (CSVD). For this party he was a member of the German Reichstag from 1930 to 1933 ; there he voted u. a. for Hitler's enabling law. He was its chairman until the party dissolved itself in 1933.

After the Second World War , Simpfendörfer helped found the CDU. In 1946 he became a member of the provisional parliament , then in the state constitutional assembly and finally in the state parliament of Württemberg-Baden , where he represented the constituency of Leonberg-Vaihingen until 1950 and then the constituency of Leonberg and in the last two chambers until December 20, 1946 Was President in the Landtag for ten days. From December 1946 he was Minister of Education for the State of Württemberg-Baden for a few months, but resigned in 1947. From 1948 to 1958 Simpfendörfer was chairman of the CDU regional association North-Württemberg . After the state of Baden-Württemberg was founded in 1952, he was a member of the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg as a member of the Leonberg constituency until 1960 . In the fall of 1953, Prime Minister Gebhard Müller brought him into his first cabinet, again as Minister of Culture. During his term of office, among other things, the private school law for Baden-Württemberg and the law on school building fell.

After a month-long illness at the end of 1957, Simpfendörfer announced his resignation as minister of education in the spring of 1958. However, he remained a CDU member and was later honorary chairman of his party until he resigned from this office in November 1965. In 1971 Simpfendörfer resigned from the CDU because of its attitude towards German Ostpolitik at the time .

Simpfendörfer was buried in the new cemetery in Korntal.

Wilhelm Simpfendörfer was the father of the theologian Werner Simpfendörfer and the grandfather of the MLPD politician Monika Gärtner-Engel .

Prizes and awards

In 1958 he received the Great Cross of Merit with Star and Shoulder Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic. He was also an honorary doctor of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and an honorary citizen of the city of Korntal.

literature

• Maier should go. And Maier was gone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1947 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Simpfendörfer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Simpfendörfer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Wilhelm Simpfendörfer in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Wilhelm Simpfendörfer in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dieter Fricke: Lexicon for the history of parties. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789–1945) . Volume 1. Cologne 1983, pp. 464-470, here: p. 464.
2. ↑ Werner Simpfendörfer
3. ↑ A touch of revolution in the TV home ( Memento from November 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) website of the Stuttgarter Zeitung , August 19, 2011