Gustav Bauer

Gustav Adolf Bauer ( born January 6, 1870 in Darkehmen ( East Prussia ), † September 16, 1944 in Berlin) was SPD politician and June 21, 1919 and March 26, 1920 Chancellor of the Weimar Republic ( until August 14, 1919 Prime Minister ).

Life and career

Bauer, son of a bailiff, whose ancestors had emigrated 1731/32 from southern Germany to East Prussia, worked after the completion of primary school in Königsberg in 1884, first as a clerk in a law firm. After a serious illness he had a leg amputated in 1888. From 1893 to December 1895 he was office manager at prominent trial lawyer Fritz Friedmann. Bauer founded in 1895 the " National Association of Bureau staff in Germany," he said with the " Association of the administrative officials of the health insurance companies ' board in 1908 until the merger. After he had lost his job in 1902 because of union activity, he became an independent restaurateur, but this was after only one year on, when he became a full-time director of the trade union Central Secretariat workers. From 1908 to 1918, Bauer had held the office of vice-chairman of the General Commission of Trade Unions of Germany. In 1912 he was elected Chairman of the newly established People's care. In 1917 he was involved in the founding of the People's League for Freedom and Fatherland, which should act as a counterweight to the extremist German Fatherland Party. After retiring from politics, he was managing director of a Berlin housing association.

After the National Socialists took power, he was arrested in May 1933 on charges related to tax offenses for several weeks. Presumably this was a conspiracy, because evidence could not be presented. Then he no longer exhibited.

Gustav Bauer was married to Hedwig Moch. His grave is in the cemetery of the parish Glienicke / Northern Railway.

Party

Bauer was a member of the SPD, where he belonged to the right wing of the party, who supported the policy of the truce with the Reich government during the First World War. In 1925 he was expelled in connection with the Barmat scandal from the SPD. The party Arbitration Court overturned the exclusion on 14 May 1926 on back. He belonged to the period of the Weimar Republic in the Reichsbanner black-red- gold.

Member of Parliament

In 1912 he moved as a Social Democratic member for the electoral district of Wroclaw 6 (Breslau -east) in the Diet of the Empire, where he belonged to the Budget Committee since 1915. After the November Revolution, he was elected to the Weimar National Assembly. Then he was again a member of parliament until 1928.

Public offices

Chancellor Max von Baden appointed him in October 1918 to the Secretary of the Labour Office. The Cabinet Scheidemann belonged Bauer since 13 February 1919 as Minister of Labour. After Scheidemann's resignation on June 20, 1919 on the following day Bauer Chancellor of the government that signed the Treaty of Versailles, although he himself rejected the terms of the contract. After he spoke out already on 22 June for the acceptance of the contract, but with the Entente still wanted to protest against individual determinations ( war guilt question and extradition of German citizens ), he had to admit a day later in the meeting of the Weimar National Assembly that his interventions in the victors had no success. That he, in spite of rejected by him clauses for the sole war guilt of Germany and Germany's obligation to extradite German nationals upon request, spoke for the signing of the contract, he reasoned as follows:

He sat in his tenure, the assignment of the railways in the kingdom of responsibility as well by as with Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger financial reform. Bauer had to resign in 1920 after the Kapp Putsch, because he had lost as well as the defense minister of his cabinet, Gustav Noske, the confidence of his party and the trade unions; but in the following reign of his party colleague Hermann Müller, he held the post of Minister for the Treasury and from 1 May 1920, the transport portfolio, which he headed until June 25, 1920. In 1921 he was a member of the second cabinet Wirth as Vice-Chancellor and Reich Minister of the Treasury.