Carl Friedrich Goerdeler (; 31 July 1884 – 2 February 1945) was a German conservative politician, monarchist, executive, economist, civil servant and opponent of the Nazi regime. He opposed anti-Jewish policies while he held office and was opposed to the Holocaust.
Had the 20 July plot to overthrow Hitler's dictatorship in 1944 succeeded, Goerdeler would have served as the Chancellor of the new government. After his arrest, he gave the names of numerous co-conspirators to the Gestapo, causing the arrests and executions of hundreds. Goerdeler was executed by hanging on 2 February 1945.
Due his close relations with the Freiburg Circles, he is regarded as one of many forerunners of the social market economy.
Early life and career Goerdeler was born into a family of Prussian civil servants in Schneidemühl in the Prussian Province of Posen of the German Empire (now Piła in present-day Poland). Goerdeler's parents supported the Free Conservative Party, and after 1899 Goerdeler's father served in the Prussian Landtag as a member of that party. Goerdeler's biographer and friend Gerhard Ritter described his upbringing as one 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 (to restore everything in Christ). From 1902 to 1905 Goerdeler studied economics and law at the University of Tübingen.. From 1911 he worked as a civil servant for the municipal government of Solingen in the Prussian Rhine Province. The same year, Goerdeler married Anneliese Ulrich, by whom he would have five children.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, combined 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 the First World War, Goerdeler served as a junior officer on the Eastern Front, rising to the rank of captain. From February 1918 he worked as part of the German military government in Minsk. After the war ended, Goerdeler served on the headquarters of the XVII Army Corps based in Danzig (now Gdańsk in 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 to prevent territorial losses on Germany's eastern borders.
After his discharge from the German Army, Goerdeler joined the ultraconservative German National People's Party (DNVP). Like most other Germans, Goerdeler strongly opposed the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which forced Germany to 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 strong hostile feelings towards Poland, Goerdeler played a key role during the 1920 Polish–Soviet War in breaking a strike by Danzig dockers, who wished to shut down Poland's economy by closing its principal port. He thought that Poland was a less undesirable neighbour than Bolshevik Russia.
In 1922, Goerdeler was elected as mayor (Bürgermeister) of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in East Prussia and later, on 22 May 1930, as mayor of Leipzig. During the Weimar Republic era (1918–1933), Goerdeler was widely regarded as a hard-working and outstanding municipal politician.
On 8 December 1931, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a personal friend, appointed Goerdeler 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. Later he resigned from the DNVP because its leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a committed foe of the Brüning government.
In the early 1930s, Goerdeler became a leading advocate of the viewpoint that the Weimar Republic had failed, as shown by the Great Depression, and that a conservative revolution was needed to replace democracy.
After the downfall of the Brüning government in 1932, Goerdeler was considered a potential Chancellor. General Kurt von Schleicher sounded him out for the post but eventually Franz von Papen was chosen instead.
After the fall of Brüning's government on 30 May 1932, Brüning recommended Goerdeler to President Paul von Hindenburg as his successor. Hindenburg rejected Goerdeler because of his former membership of the DNVP. (From 1928, under the leadership of Alfred Hugenberg, the DNVP had waged a vituperative campaign against Hindenburg and had even labelled him as one of the "November Criminals" who had allegedly "stabbed Germany in the back" in 1918. As a result, by 1932, no current or even former member of the DNVP was acceptable to Hindenburg as chancellor.)
The fall of Brüning led to Goerdeler's resignation as Price Commissioner. Later in 1932, Goerdeler refused an offer to serve in Papen's cabinet.
Role in the Nazi government Mayor in the Third Reich As late as 1935, Goerdeler considered Adolf Hitler an "enlightened dictator", who, with the proper advice, would be a force for good. Goerdeler later called the period in which he supported the Nazis the only chapter of his life that he found embarrassing. On 1 April 1933, the day of the national boycott declared against all Jewish businesses in the Reich, Goerdeler appeared in full uniform of the Oberbürgermeister of Leipzig to order the SA not to enforce the boycott and ordered the Leipzig police to free several Jews taken hostage by the SA. Several times, he attempted to help Leipzig Jewish businessmen threatened with the "Aryanisation" economic policies of the Nazi regime. A few days after the boycott, Goerdeler found himself as mayor of Leipzig enforcing the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which, unlike the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, did not give him cause for complaint.
As part of his efforts to influence the Nazi regime, Goerdeler had sent Hitler long memoranda containing his advice on economic policy, and in the second half of 1935, he wrote up a new draft law on the powers and responsibilities of municipal governments. He served as a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law. Despite his early sympathy for the regime and considerable pressure from the National Socialists, Goerdeler always refused to join the NSDAP. By the mid-1930s, Goerdeler grew increasingly disillusioned with the Nazis as it became more and more apparent that Hitler had no interest in reading any of Goerdeler's memoranda but was instead carrying out economic and financial policies that Goerdeler regarded as highly irresponsible.
In addition, the massive increase in spending by the Leipzig municipal government caused the city's debts to be a major source of worry for Goerdeler. By 1934 he clashed with Hitler over his foreign policy, as Germany signed a nonaggression treaty with Poland to which Goerdeler was opposed and demanded annexation of Polish territories. He wrote to Hitler that continued Polish possession of territories in Gdańsk Pomerania and Greater Poland was a "thorn in country's economic flesh and honour" and that "the German people must fight for security of their existence".
In 1933, a Reich law forbade doctors who were members of the Communist Party of Germany or were "non-Aryans" from participating in public health insurance, exempting only those who were First World War veterans or children or parents of veterans. A second decree of 1934 banned all physicians from participating in public health insurance who had one or more Jewish grandparents regardless of their religion or if they were married to a "non-Aryan". However, the laws did not affect those physicians who received their approbation under the Weimar Republic.
On 9 April 1935, the Deputy Mayor of Leipzig, the National Socialist Rudolf Haake, overstepping existing laws, banned all Jewish doctors from participating in public health insurance and advised all municipal employees not to consult Jewish doctors. In response, the Landesverband Mitteldeutschland des Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens e. V (Middle German Regional Association of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) complained to Goerdeler and asked him to enforce the existing antisemitic laws, which allowed at least some Jewish doctors to practice.
On 11 April 1935, Goerdeler ordered the end of Haake's boycott and provided a list of "non-Aryan" physicians permitted to operate and those excluded. Critics of Goerdeler, such as the American political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, have considered the exclusion list as evidence of Goerdeler's antisemitism. By contrast, defenders like the Canadian historian Peter Hoffmann have argued that Goerdeler's insistence on enforcing the laws served to protect at least some Jewish physicians.
Price Commissioner: making economic policy In November 1934, Goerdeler was again appointed Reich Price Commissioner, and ordered to combat the increasingly unpopular inflation caused by rearmament. Gestapo reports from 1934 record that the German public greeted the news of Goerdeler's reappointment as Price Commissioner as a positive development. Despite the great fanfare that greeted Goerdeler's appointment, he was given little real power.
In 1934, Goerdeler was vehemently opposed to the idea of devaluing the Reichsmark and had supported Hitler and Schacht against the advocates of devaluation. During his second term as Price Commissioner in 1934–35, Goerdeler often came into conflict with the Economics Minister and Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht over his inflationary policies. In Goerdeler's opinion, they posed a grave danger to the German economy, and finally prompted his resignation in 1935 as Price Commissioner. As Price Commissioner, Goerdeler became increasingly troubled by Nazi economic policies and disgusted by rampant corruption within the Nazi Party. In September 1935, as mayor of Leipzig, Goerdeler found himself enforcing the Nuremberg Laws, which he found deeply distasteful.
In October 1935, Goerdeler sent Hitler a memorandum in which he urged that the priorities for the use of German foreign exchange should be shifted from buying raw materials that Germany lacked for rearmament and instead should be used to buy food that Germany lacked such as fats. In his report, Goerdeler wrote that the foremost goal of German economic policy should be "the satisfactory provisioning of the population with fats, even in relation to armaments, as having political priority". In the same report, Goerdeler argued that the root of German economic problems was rearmament, and he advocated as the solution reducing military spending, increasing German exports and returning to a free-market economy.