Theodor Steltzer

Nationality

Germany

Date of Birth

1885

Date of Death

1967

Political
Preference

Christian Democrat

Theodor Steltzer was born in Trittau, Schleswig-Holstein and studied political science and economics in Munich. Steltzer was a public opponent of the National Socialists and joined the Kreisau Circle resistance network. After the Second World War, he became Prime Minister (CDU) of Schleswig-Holstein from 1946 – 1947.

Because Steltzer could no longer find employment in the civil service due to his political opposition to Nazism, he started to work in the church world. He joined the Evangelical Michael Brotherhood in Marburg and took over the management of the Secretariat in 1936. In 1939, he was called up to the Wehrmacht after the German invasion of Poland and served as a lieutenant colonel on the general staff of the Wehrmacht commander in Oslo since 1940. Here, he established links with the Norwegian resistance movement and got in touch with with Arvid Brodersen and Eivind Berggrav, the Lutheran Bishop of Oslo.

In the same year he got to know Helmuth James Graf von Moltke through O.H. von der Gablentz and was invited as a member of the Kreisau Circle. Steltzer participated in the planning of the future state structure, church and cultural policy and European unification. In 1942 he traveled to Kreisau for the first and second meetings of the group. Together with Moltke, Steltzer campaigned for Norwegian Jews and other persecuted people and established contacts to England through the Norwegian resistance.

After the failed coup attempt on July 20, 1944, Steltzer, who was designated by the conspirators as the state administrator for Schleswig-Holstein, was called back to Berlin and arrested by the Gestapo. On January 15, 1945, the People’s Court sentenced him to death. After Swedish and Norwegian friends intervened with Reich Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler, the execution was put on hold and Steltzer was released on April 25, 1945.

Steltzer was one of only three German representatives to the founding conference of the CCIA in Cambridge in 1946. There, he warned the delegates against a too one-sided view of Germany as a defeated enemy, directing attention to the grave social, psychological, and economic distress many Germans faced.

In 1945, Steltzer was one of the co-founders of the CDU in Berlin and from 1945 to 1947 he was first president, later Prime Minister of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Steltzer also participated in meetings of the Imshausen Society, which sought to renew Germany from the spirit of resistance. From 1950 to 1952 he headed the Institute for the Promotion of Public Affairs in Frankfurt am Main. From 1955 to 1960 he was President of the German UNESCO Commission and co-founded the Deutschen Geselschaft für Auswärtige Politik, a renowned think thank that still operates today.