Willem Drees

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Willem Drees
Speech by Drees before he left for Indonesia (January 1949)
Willem Drees in conversation with Minister Herman Witte
The grave of Willem Drees in the family grave in the Oude Eik en Duinen cemetery in The Hague.

Willem Drees (born July 5, 1886 in Amsterdam , † May 14, 1988 in The Hague ) was a Dutch politician. Between 1948 and 1958 he was Prime Minister of the Netherlands . He belonged to the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid and is considered the father of the Dutch welfare state.

Life

Drees passed his exam at the Amsterdam Public Trade School in 1903. Until 1906 he worked at Twentsche Bank in Amsterdam. He then became a stenographer in the City Council of Amsterdam and from 1907 to 1919 in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament.

In 1904 Drees became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP), which became part of the PvdA in 1946 . From 1910 to 1931 he was chairman of the Hague district of the SDAP. From 1913 to 1941 Drees was a member of the Hague City Council. During this period between 1919 and 1931 he was responsible for social affairs and until 1933 for finance and public institutions.

Between 1919 and 1941 Drees was also a member of the provincial parliament of South Holland and from 1927 to 1946 he was on the board of the SDAP. In 1933 Drees was elected to the Second Chamber for the SDAP. From 1939 until his resignation in May 1940 he was parliamentary group leader of the party.

During the Second World War , Drees was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1940 to 1941 . From 1944 until the end of the war, Drees was a member of the college of shop stewards, which tried to transfer formal authority in the liberated south of the Netherlands back to the government.

From June 24, 1945 to August 7, 1948, Drees was Minister of Social Affairs in the Schermerhorn / Drees cabinet and in the first Beel cabinet . On August 7, 1948, Drees became Prime Minister of the Netherlands and held office in four consecutive cabinets ( Drees / Van Schaik , Drees I , II and III ) until December 22, 1958. The short-lived, loose Dutch-Indonesian Union (1949–1954), which he tried in vain to strengthen , also fell during his term of office . After leaving the office of Prime Minister Drees was appointed Minister of State by Queen Juliana .

Drees spoke Esperanto and gave the opening speech at the Esperanto World Congress in Haarlem in 1954 .

In 1948 he received an honorary doctorate from the Netherlands University of Economics in Rotterdam and in 1952 from the University of Maryland .

Drees was very popular with the Dutch. They gave him the nickname Vadertje Drees (Father Drees). As minister of social affairs, he initiated numerous social laws and laid the foundations of the Dutch welfare state as early as 1947 . The General Pension Act (Algemene Ouderdomswet, AOW) was introduced under Drees, guaranteeing every Dutch taxpayer a basic pension from the age of 65. In the 1960s, Drees was dissatisfied with his party's left-wing course, but left it unlike his son Willem Drees Jr. Not.

His grave is in the Dutch cemetery Oud Eik en Duinen in The Hague .

See also

Web links

Commons : Willem Drees  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. UEA: Reta Muzeo. Materialoj el Biblioteko Hector Hodler. 1947-1974. Welt-Esperanto-Bund ( Memento of the original from July 22, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / uea.org