Alfred Dregger: A biography of the CDU hardliner. – Politics

The authors were aware that it would not be easy to do justice to their “desideratum”, i.e. their desired object, without wanting to sugarcoat something. “Because who seriously wants to be with one reactionary and nationalist hand it over,” they ask, emphatically provocative but not really meant to be serious, in the introduction to their almost 600-page tome. It’s about “the” provocative figure in German post-war history, it’s about Alfred Dregger (1920-2002).

The special thing about him: Although a very well-known politician, His career was limited: mayor of Fulda, four times unsuccessful CDU top candidate for the office of prime minister in Hesse, after all CDU state chairman in Hesse and finally parliamentary group leader of the Union parties in the Bundestag. But that’s about it, never a minister, not even a state secretary. In the face of their protagonist, the authors Wolfram Pyta and Nils Havemann seem torn between astonishment and open admiration, as the German public probably did for a long time.

The history professor Pyta, who teaches at the University of Stuttgart, made a name for himself in 2019 when he was the only one of four experts to deny that Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, son of the last German Emperor Wilhelm II, had “considerably encouraged” the Nazi dictatorship. Among other things, Pyta had put forward the original thesis that the crown prince had done Hitler more harm than good with his support because of his unpopularity. The Freiburg historian Ulrich Herbert: “You have to come to that first.”

The man from the “steel helmet faction”

The 62-year-old Pyta also wrote a remarkable biography about Paul von Hindenburg – apparently he has a soft spot for conspicuous people in contemporary history. The political scientist Havemann, five years his junior, became known for a study on the subject of “football under the swastika”.

Back to Dregger: On the one hand, the two authors are concerned with correcting an “enemy image”: A “late-comer” who only joined the CDU in his mid-30s, who was wrongly labeled by his opponents as a “prototype of a reactionary”, who wanted to dismantle the rule of law, had been distorted into an unpredictable “law-and-order man”, a “Django” or a member of the “steel helmet faction”. Instead, superlatives about the protagonist, especially in his Property as long-time head of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group (1982 to 1991), poured out: The “unyielding admonisher” for the freedom and unity of the nation was “eloquent”, at the same time “language-sensitive” and a “national political trendsetter”, although “not a thinker”, but nevertheless with “his own will to shape things ” and – this praise runs through the entire book – a person with “natural talent for leadership”.

The latter is strange insofar as the authors are convinced that Dregger was able to cultivate the leadership style that he learned as a front-line soldier as a faction leader. It is true that a faction is “not a military combat unit”, but the “concept of comradeship” is transferrable. This is how a functioning community is formed, which does not abolish “necessary hierarchies”. The authors, who like to use military phrases (“anti-socialist combat brigade”), see Dregger in the “battle suit” that was tailored to his body. In striking and not very credible contrast to this, it is said that he nonetheless rejected “every harsh friend-foe confrontation”.

Hardliners among themselves: Franz Josef Strauss (left) and Alfred Dregger at a CSU party conference in 1987.

(Photo: imago/WEREK)

The continuum from the captain and battalion commander Dregger to the fair and freedom-loving Union politician is viewed benevolently, but the authors can also distance themselves as harshly. Terms such as “security”, “freedom” or “peace” should “appear as mere buzzwords, detached from any context”. Dregger revealed how flexible the often pathetically invoked “freedom” was when he paid his respects to the apartheid state of South Africa, Chile and Argentina in 1977 and 1979, where the criminal military dictatorships murdered many thousands of people. The authors try to explain Dregger’s insensitivity by stating that human rights issues outside of Europe played only a minor role for him, while acknowledging that he also viewed the repressive systems in Greece, Spain and Portugal “with extraordinary leniency”. For Dregger, it was always a matter of fending off an “ideological war of aggression by world communism”. Whereby the threatening socialism for him already began with parity co-determination in business enterprises.

On the basis of the parliamentary group meetings that were fully recorded from 1972 to 1994, the authors pay tribute to Dregger’s skill and his “leadership talent”. A highlight for them is that the “chancellor candidate maker” at the time when Helmut Kohl was still head of the parliamentary group managed to get Franz Josef Strauss number one for the 1980 federal elections. That was a prestige success for Dregger, but not for the Union parties, which were once again the strongest political force but still had to put up with a chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. He is also credited with the fact that Dregger vehemently advocated Berlin as the future capital after German unification (with some concessions to Bonn). With all the praise for Dregger’s skilful directing, the narrow voting victory for Berlin (338 against 320 votes) must be attributed to someone else above all: “It was Schäublewho was able to reap the political harvest that we had sown together.”

He upheld the “honor” of the Wehrmacht throughout his life

For the two authors, the focus and “heart” of the book is the work in the parliamentary groups. As indisputably important as this is for a functioning parliamentary democracy, Dregger (a member of the NSDAP since 1940, which he denied until his death) is much more interested in how he saw his time as a front-line officer. He never got tired of that “Honour” of the German Wehrmacht soldiers – which, as Pyta and Havemann state, slightly stunned, “at least implied that they had not committed any war crimes and had not abused the civilian population”. In his numerous field post letters, Dregger states that he is an “enthusiastic soldier”, there is “nothing nicer than being a company commander”, he speaks of the “chivalrous character” and the “decency” of the troops, but mentions them, as do the authors complain, the mass murders of the Jews “not a word”. When Dregger also crossed Poland and Belarus on his journey home, he must have been “stricken with blindness and deafness if he had completely missed such events”. In addition, in the 6th Infantry Division, to which Dregger belonged, shootings of Soviet “political commissars” were “on record” as early as the summer of 1941.

The Political Book: Wolfram Pyta, Nils Havemann: Alfred Dregger.  Politician of the time of reunification and advocate of parliamentarism.  Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne 2022. 584 pages, 59 euros.

Wolfram Pyta, Nils Havemann: Alfred Dregger. Politician of the time of reunification and advocate of parliamentarism. Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne 2022. 584 pages, 59 euros.

(Photo: Böhlau Verlag)

There are still many creepy quotes, some of which have been highlighted by the authors, but they contradict their surprising main thesis that Dregger was not a right-wing radical, not even a conservative, but rather a “national liberal”. It is not for nothing that right-wing extremist circles repeatedly referred to Dregger, for example when he stylized the German war of annihilation as a fight to “defend Germany” or even complained about “the cynical one-sidedness of our national masochists”.

Neither right-wing radical nor conservative?

In the Bundestag debate of March 13, 1997, in which Pyta/Havemann praised one of the “great moments of parliamentarism”, the “Wehrmachts exhibition”, which was hotly debated at the time, was debated, but also the tirades of colleague Dregger. The plenum gave him applause when he suddenly surprisingly showed a little bit of insight: “I want (…) to state that the criticism that has been leveled at me will be examined by me, that I will not flatly reject it become.” Although Dregger, now almost 78, wanted to run again in the 1998 federal election, his party no longer took part. His successor in the Bundestag, however, was a certain one Martin Hohman. It wasn’t a good choice, because in 2003 he involuntarily came out as an anti-Semite and was therefore expelled from the parliamentary group. Even Dregger didn’t deserve such a successor.

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