Adolf Lampe

Nationality

Germany

Date of Birth

1897

Date of Death

1948

Political
Preference

Adolf Lampe was born in Frankfurt am Main and was a German economist. He contributed significantly to the resistance against National Socialism through his work within the Freiburger Circle. He was put into a concentration camp because of the ideas espoused in his book Allgemeine Wehrwirtschaftslehre (1938), which ruined his health and led to an early death.

Adolf Lampe did military service in the First World War and after the end of the war studied economics in Frankfurt am Main. After completing his doctorate, Lampe worked as an assistant to Adolf Weber and from 1922 also as a research assistant at the Munich Chamber of Commerce. He obtained a post at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg in 1926. Lampe became chair of economics for the winter semester of 1933-1934. From November 1938, he became significantly involved in the Freiburger Circle.

He contributed to both the ‘Bonhoeffer-Kreis’, which drafted a highly secret memorandum on the post-war order in Germany, and the separate group led by Erwin von Beckerath, which met eight times in Freiburg and one time in Jena and Bad Godesberg until June 1944. More than forty of the expert reports on post-war economic order and minutes drawn up have been preserved and published, most of which were written by Lampe.