Helene Wessel (6 July 1898 - 13 October 1969) was a German politician. From October 1949 to January 1952 she was chairwoman of the Centre Party and a founding member of the All-German People's Party, which eventually joined the SPD. She was elected to the Parlamentarischer Rat, [1] the West German constitutional convention.
Helene Wessel was born on 6 July 1898 in Hörde (now in Dortmund) and was the youngest of four children of the Reichsbahn officials Henry Wessel and his wife, Helene Wessel, born in Linz. Her parents were deeply influenced by their Catholic faith, her father being a member of the German Centre Party. He died in 1905 from the consequences of an unknown accident.
She completed a commercial apprenticeship in November 1915 and worked as a secretary in the office of the Centre Party Horder. In March 1923, she began a one-year course at the State Welfare School in Munster for youth and social welfare. In 1919, she became involved in the Centre Party, and was elected in May 1928 in the Prussian Parliament. She managed two professions on as party secretary and another as a social worker of the Catholic Church. In October 1929, she settled at the Berlin Academy of German social and educational women's work to educate graduate welfare workers. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Wessel was classified as "politically unreliable".
After the Second World War she was active politically again. In 1949 she was one of the Center part's representatives in the Bundestag and also was elected chairwoman of the party, the first woman ever to lead a German party. A Lutheran pacifist, [2] the left-wing Catholic vocally opposed in 1951. [3] Adenauer's policy of German rearmament and joined forces with the CDU's Gustav Heinemann, the former Minister of the Interior. Both formed the "Notgemeinschaft zur Rettung des Friedens in Europa" ("Emergency Community to Save Peace in Europe"), an initiative intended to prevent rearmament.
Wessel resigned from her post and in November 1952 and left the party. Immediately afterwards, Wessel and Heinemann turned the "Notgemeinschaft" into a political party, the "Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei" ("Whole-German People's Party" aka GVP), which failed badly in the elections of 1953. In 1957, the GVP dissolved and most members joined the SPD.
Johannes Rau was a German politician (SPD). He was the president of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and the minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In the latter role, he also served as president of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and in 1994/95.
Gustav Walter Heinemann was a German politician who was President of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He served as mayor of Essen from 1946 to 1949, West German Minister of the Interior from 1949 to 1950, and Minister of Justice from 1966 to 1969.
Friedrich Ebert was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the first president of Germany from 1919 until his death in office in 1925.
The Centre Party, officially the German Centre Party and also known in English as the Catholic Centre Party, is a Christian democratic and Catholic political party in Germany. Influential in the German Empire and Weimar Republic, it is the oldest German political party in existence. Formed in 1870, it successfully battled the Kulturkampf waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church. It soon won a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and its middle position on most issues allowed it to play a decisive role in the formation of majorities. The party name Zentrum (Centre) originally came from the fact that Catholic representatives would take up the middle section of seats in parliament between the social democrats and the conservatives.
The Parlamentarischer Rat was the West German constituent assembly in Bonn that drafted and adopted the constitution of West Germany, the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, promulgated on 23 May 1949.
Andrea Maria Nahles is a former German politician who has been the director of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) since 2022.
The All-German People's Party was a minor political party in West Germany active between 1952 and 1957. It was a Christian, pacifist, centre-left party that opposed the re-armament of West Germany because it believed that the remilitarisation and NATO integration would make German reunification impossible, deepen the division of Europe and pose a danger to peace.
Marie Juchacz was a German social reformer.
Annemarie Renger, was a German politician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
Helene Weber was a German politician and was known as a women's rights activist. In the Weimar Republic she rose to prominence in the Catholic Centre Party. In 1945 she was among the founders of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In 1948 she was a co-founder of the CDU Women's Task Force, a precursor of the party's Women's Union, which she chaired from 1951 to 1958. Weber is one of four women who, alongside 61 men, drafted Germany's constitution, the Basic Law, in 1948-49. After initial hesitation, she closed ranks with the women delegates of the Social Democratic Party to successfully fight for the inclusion of the sentence "Men and women shall have equal rights" in Article 3 of the Basic Law. She is often cited for her anti-war statement: "The entirely male-run state is the ruin of nations".
Marie-Luise "Malu" Dreyer is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has served as the 8th and current Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate since 13 January 2013. She is the first woman to hold this office. She served a one-year-term as the President of the Bundesrat from 1 November 2016 – 2017, which made her the deputy to the President of Germany while in office. She was the second female President of the Bundesrat and the sixth woman holding one of the five highest federal offices in Germany.
Rosa Aschenbrenner was a German politician. After the Second World War, she became increasingly marginalised from the political mainstream because of her opposition to rearmament.
Angelika Barbe is a German biologist who became a politician.
Elisabeth Zillken was a German politician.
Charlotte Niehaus was a welfare pioneer, a politician (USPD, SPD and, between 1920 and 1933, a member of the Bremen state parliament .
Ute Vogt is a German lawyer and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as a member of the Bundestag from 1994 to 2005 and from 2009 to 2021. Since 2021, she has been serving as president of the German Life Saving Association (DLRG).
Friederike Nadig was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). One of the four women members of the Parlamentarischer Rat who drafted the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948/49, she was one of the Mothers of the Basic Law.
Helene Glatzer was a young Communist politician who after 1933 became a German anti-government resistance activist. She died - some sources state simply that she was murdered - following several days of questioning and torture at the police facility in the Hallmarkt district of central Halle.
Katrin Budde is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Saxony-Anhalt since 2017.
Ella Ehlers was a German Kindergarten teacher. Through her work, in 1926 she met Adolf Ehlers (1898–1978), a political activist who at around the same time was readmitted to the Communist Party. She became his secretary and then, in 1928, his wife. Ella Schimpf had grown up in a heavily politicised family, and she now participated energetically with her husband in the increasingly polarised politics of the time. After 1933 she engaged in dangerous anti-government resistance, but she nevertheless survived the twelve Hitler years.
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