31 Facts About Joseph Wirth

Joseph Wirth was minister of four government departments between 1920 and 1931.

Joseph Wirth was named chancellor in May 1921 when Germany was facing difficult negotiations with the Allies of World War I over German war reparations.

Joseph Wirth resigned after less than six months in protest against the partition of Upper Silesia by the League of Nations and formed a second, minority cabinet a few days later.

Joseph Wirth died in his hometown of Freiburg in 1956.

Karl Joseph Wirth was born on 6 September 1879 in Freiburg im Breisgau in what was then the Grand Duchy of Baden, a federal state of the German Empire.

Joseph Wirth was the son of Karl Wirth, a master machinist at a printing company, and his wife Agathe.

Joseph Wirth obtained his doctorate in mathematics in 1906 with the thesis "On the elementary divisors of a linear homogeneous substitution".

In 1911 Joseph Wirth was elected to the Freiburg city council for the Catholic Centre Party.

At the start of World War I, Joseph Wirth volunteered for military service but for health reasons was deemed unfit.

Joseph Wirth then volunteered with the Red Cross and served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts until 1917, when he left after contracting pneumonia.

Joseph Wirth voted for the July 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution, which was sponsored by Matthias Erzberger, of the Centre Party, and called for a negotiated peace without annexations.

Joseph Wirth engaged with Catholic workers to keep them from becoming radicalised and spoke in favour of a leading role for the Centre Party in building a democratic Germany.

Joseph Wirth's position reflected his beliefs in Catholicism's social teaching and in Christian democracy.

In January 1919, Joseph Wirth was elected to both the Baden Constituent Assembly and the Weimar National Assembly, which wrote the new constitutions for the Republic of Baden and the Weimar Republic.

Joseph Wirth continued to hold the portfolio in the subsequent cabinet of Constantin Fehrenbach.

Joseph Wirth believed that its severance from Germany would fatally affect Germany's capacity to pay its reparations.

Joseph Wirth tried to extend his government's minority coalition to the right to include the DVP, but even his own Centre Party was becoming increasingly unhappy at having to work with the SPD, which had reunited with the more radical Independent Social Democrats in September 1922.

In 1924 Joseph Wirth joined the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a paramilitary organization formed by the SPD, Centre and DDP for the non-violent protection of the Republic from the enemies of democracy.

Joseph Wirth used its rallies to speak in opposition to the Centre Party's drift to the right.

When it joined the government of the independent Hans Luther in January 1925, Joseph Wirth criticized it for working with the nationalist German National People's Party in the Luther cabinet.

Joseph Wirth left the Centre's Reichstag contingent in protest against the party's social policies In August 1925 but returned in July 1926.

Joseph Wirth had to submit to a number of conditions before his name was restored.

Joseph Wirth was highly popular with the Social Democrats and acted as mediator between them and the new government.

In March 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, Joseph Wirth spoke passionately in the Reichstag against the Nazi-sponsored Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers.

Joseph Wirth communicated with leading statesmen in Britain and France about the dangers of Nazism and travelled to the US, where he met with the exiled former chancellor Heinrich Bruning and gave lectures on the Nazi regime at Harvard University and Princeton University.

Joseph Wirth lived in Paris from 1935 to 1939, after which he returned to Lucerne.

Joseph Wirth was one of the founders of "Democratic Germany", a working group with SPD members in exile.

Joseph Wirth opposed Konrad Adenauer's policy of integration with the West for fear of making the division of Germany permanent.

The CIA file "The background of Joseph Wirth" states that Wirth was a Soviet agent.

Joseph Wirth said Beria asked him to join the East German government.

Joseph Wirth died of heart failure in 1956, aged 76, in his hometown of Freiburg and was buried in the city's main cemetery.