Carl Friedrich Goerdeler - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Goerdeler was born to a family of Prussian civil servants in Schneidemühl, Germany (now Piła, Poland) in the Prussian Province of Posen. Goerdeler's parents were supporters of the Free Conservative Party, and Goerdeler's father served in the Prussian Landtag as a member of that party after 1899. Goerdeler's upbringing was described by his biographer and friend Gerhard Ritter as a part of a large, loving middle-class family that was cultured, devoutly Lutheran, nationalist, and conservative. As a young man, the deeply religious Goerdeler chose as his motto to live by, omnia restaurare in Christo (restoring everything in Christ). Goerdeler studied economics and law at the University of Tübingen between 1902 and 1905. Starting in 1911, Goerdeler worked as a civil servant for the municipal government of Solingen. That same year, Goerdeler married Anneliese Ulrich, by whom he had five children. Goerdeler was described as:

Goerdeler's own career had been both impressive and idiosyncratic. He came of conservative Prussian stock with a strong sense of duty and service to the State; his father had been a district judge. His upbringing had been happy, but sternly intellectual and moral; his legal training had pointed to a career in local administration and economics...He was a born organiser, an able, voluble speaker and writer, tough and highly individual; in politics he became a right-wing liberal. Although at heart a very humane man, Goerderler's frigid, spartan belief in hard work and his austere, puritanical morality-he would not tolerate a divorced man or woman in his house-lacked warmth and comradeship. He was, in fact, an autocrat by nature and his commanding personality, combinded with his utter belief in the rightness of his point of view, enabled him to persuade weak or uncertain men over-easily to accept his own particular point of view while he was with them

During World War I, Goerdeler served as a junior officer on the Eastern Front, rising to the rank of Captain. From February 1918, Captain Goerdeler worked as part of the German military government in Minsk. After the end of war in November 1918, Goerdeler served on the headquarters of the XVII Army Corps based in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In June 1919, Goerdeler submitted a memorandum to his superior, General Otto von Below, calling for the destruction of Poland as the only way of preventing territorial losses on Germany's eastern borders. After his discharge from the German Army, Goerdeler joined the ultra-conservative German National People's Party (DNVP). Like most of the political class of Germany at that time, Goerdeler strongly rejected the Versailles Treaty, which stipulated that Germany cede territories to the restored Polish state. In 1919, before the exact boundaries of the Polish-German border were determined, he suggested restoring West Prussia to Germany. Despite his strongly held hostile feelings towards Poland, Goerdeler played a key role in breaking a strike by the Danzig dockers, who wished to shut down the Polish economy by closing Poland's principal port during the Polish–Soviet War of 1920 on the grounds that however undesirable Poland was as a neighbour, Soviet Russia would be even worse.

In 1922, Goerdeler was elected as the mayor (Bürgermeister) of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in East Prussia before being elected mayor of Leipzig on May 22, 1930. During the Weimar Republic, Goerdeler was widely considered to be a hard-working and outstanding municipal politician. On December 8, 1931, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a personal friend of Goerdeler, appointed him as Reich Price Commissioner, and entrusted him with the task of overseeing his deflationary policies. The sternness with which Goerdeler administered his task as Price Commissioner made him a well-known figure in Germany. Accepting the post of Price Commissioner forced Goerdeler to resign from the DNVP because Alfred Hugenberg was a committed foe of the Brüning government. In the early 1930s, Goerdeler was a leading advocate of the viewpoint that the Weimar Republic had failed as proven by the Great Depression, and what was needed was a right-wing revolution to replace democracy.

After the downfall of the Brüning government in 1932, Goerdeler was considered to be a potential Chancellor and was sounded out by General Kurt von Schleicher, who ultimately chose Franz von Papen instead. Following the fall of his government on May 30, 1932, Brüning himself recommended to President Paul von Hindenburg that Goerdeler succeed him. Hindenburg vetoed Goerdeler because of his former membership in the German National People's Party (DNVP). Starting in 1928, under the leadership of Alfred Hugenberg, the DNVP had waged a vituperative campaign against Hindenburg, claiming that he was one of the "November Criminals" who were alleged to have "stabbed Germany in the back" in 1918, which led Hindenburg to loathe and hate the DNVP. As a result, by 1932, no member of the DNVP or even a former member was acceptable to Hindenburg as Chancellor. The fall of Brüning led to Goerdeler resigning as Price Commissioner. Later in 1932, Goerdeler was offered a position in Papen's cabinet, which he refused.