19 Facts About Wilhelm Nowack

Wilhelm Nowack was a German economist who became a journalist and, more briefly, a radio producer.

Wilhelm Nowack was born at Altenburg, a small town at the eastern end of Thuringia in central-southern Germany After successfully completing his schooling he moved on to study Economics and Civil Law at the universities of Berlin and Innsbruck.

Wilhelm Nowack soon switched back to print media teaming up with the buioding engineer Peter Josef Stein to found the Koblenz-based Rhein-Zeitung : the first edition was printed towards the end of April 1946.

Wilhelm Nowack moved on after just one year, selling his share in the newspaper enterprise to Walter Twer, a businessman from nearby Nassau.

In 1924, during the republic years, Wilhelm Nowack was a co-founder of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold movement, becoming its deputy chairman in the politically important Berlin-Brandenburg region.

Wilhelm Nowack stayed with the DDP after 1930 when the party rebranded and relaunched itself as the Deutsche Staatspartei in a desperate effort to dissuade voters, badly hit by the economic backwash from the Wall Street crash, from transferring their political support to populist politicians.

Wilhelm Nowack later served as chairman of the party in Rhineland-Pfalz between 1953 and 1958.

Wilhelm Nowack was elected to serve as leader of the FDP parliamentary group between 1948 and 1951.

On 13 June 1951 Wilhelm Nowack joined the co-alition Government of Rhineland-Palatinate as State Minister for Finance and Reconstruction, a post he retained until resigning from it on 11 November 1958.

Wilhelm Nowack was succeeded in the post by the lawyer-politician Hans Georg Dahlgrun, an emollient character who, importantly, was not formally a member of any political party, despite having served as a government official at the national Ministry of Finance between 1936 and 1945.

Wilhelm Nowack had been appalled by this development and had shared his opinion.

In October 1958 Dr Wilhelm Nowack resigned his office as regional Finance Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The total value at which Wilhelm Nowack had acquired his shares was 216,000 Marks, implying a loss to the company of 144,000 Marks.

Regardless of speculation in respect of possible criminal implications, Wilhelm Nowack had clearly acted unwisely in defiance of an avoidable conflict of interest, and he appears never to have denied having enriched himself through the transaction.

Wilhelm Nowack sought and obtained significant quantities of written material from Luxembourg, including information provided by Victor Bodson who had been highly critical of Drach at the time of his release from jail in Luxembourg back around Christmas 1954.

Armed with his files of additional information, Wilhelm Nowack wrote an open, and very angry, letter to the Frankfurter Neue Presse.

Wilhelm Nowack thundered in his closing paragraph that he rejected prosecution by a war criminal.

Wilhelm Nowack accepted that Drach had been convicted of war crimes, but then invoked the widely discredited Nuremberg defence by stating that Drach had been implementing the law as he understood it at the time.

Wilhelm Nowack's name was included in Albert Norden's "Brown Book" in which the author "outed" approximately 1,800 members of the West German political and administrative establishment whom he claimed to have identified as former Nazis.