Severing, Carl

(1875-1952)

   politician; Prussian Interior Minister during most of the Republic. Born to a working-class home in Herford, he apprenticed as a locksmith before joining the SPD and the metalworkers union in 1893. Settling in Bielefeld, he became business manager for both the local SPD and the union. He sat in the city council during 1905-1924 and entered the Reichs-tag* in 1907, serving initially until 1912. During 1912-1919 he edited Volks-wacht, Bielefeld s SPD newspaper.*

   Severing was a moderate who championed SPD efforts to work with the imperial regime in World War I. Subsequent to involvement with Bielefeld s Workers and Soldiers Council,* he mediated a coal miners strike in the Ruhr. It symbolizes his renown, but also the putschists detachment from reality, that Wolfgang Kapp* considered him for the Economics Ministry in March 1920. After the Kapp Putsch Severing, as Reichskommissar for Prussia,* negotiated the so-called Bielefeld Agreement that ended a workers uprising in the Ruhr. But the ruthless suppression by the military of those who rejected his compro-mise damaged his reputation with the trade unions* and instilled in him a lasting suspicion of the military.

   Severing s efforts at curbing the Ruhr crisis led Otto Braun,* Prussia s Prime Minister, to invite him to become Interior Minister. He retained the portfolio (with a brief interruption) until 1926 and held it again during 1930-1932. Mean-while, he was elected to the National Assembly* and sat in the Reichstag during 1920-1933, holding a concurrent mandate in the Prussian Landtag. In 1928-1930 he was Reich Interior Minister.

   Severing was a hard worker and a superb speaker, but his pragmatism left him little time for socialist theory. He was a proponent of the idea that the SPD should govern in coalition with the moderate bourgeois parties; his paramount goal was bolstering the Republic. Prussia, he argued, should serve as a model for democracy. He purged the civil service,* principally the police force, by replacing monarchists with supporters of the Republic—always aiming to widen the social and religious background of the bureaucracy. Ever fearful of para-military units, he quickly responded to potential insurrection on both the Right and the Left. He banned the NSDAP in Prussia in November 1922, dissolved the KPD s Proletarian Hundreds in August 1923, and was pivotal in inducing the Reich government to ban the SA* in April 1932. While he was pained at using paramilitary groups to combat antidemocratic organizations, he supported the Reichsbanner.*

   After Franz von Papen s* coup against the caretaker government of Braun and Severing, it was largely Severing who maintained that resistance was not simply hopeless but might provoke civil war. Surprisingly, given his hostility to the NSDAP, he was only briefly incarcerated during the Third Reich. From April 1947 he represented the SPD, this time in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Liang, Berlin Police Force; Orlow, Weimar Prussia, 1918-1925, Weimar Prussia, 1925-1933.