Zinn, Georg August

Lawyer, parliamentarian, resistance fighter, Minister of State, Prime Minister

Born: 27.05.1901 in Frankfurt am Main

Died: 27.03.1976 in Frankfurt am Main

He was certainly not born into a career as a leading social democratic politician in his national-liberal family home in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen. However, due to the early death of his father, who was last employed as a senior engineer at the Henschel company in Kassel, the young Zinn had to provide for his mother and three siblings, who were otherwise in dire need, since 1920. After training as a municipal civil servant with the city of Kassel immediately after leaving school in the same year, self-financed law studies in Göttingen and Berlin from 1923 to 1927 and a court clerkship in Kassel the following year, Zinn set up as a lawyer there in 1931.

Political clashes with the NSDAP were almost an everyday occurrence for him at the time, as he had already joined the SPD in 1919 and was also one of the co-founders of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Black-Red-Gold Banner of the Republic) in Kassel and Kurhessen. As a city councillor for his party since 1929, he had repeatedly stood up to Roland Freisler, the later president of the infamous "People's Court", and then also participated in the SPD's early anti-Nazi resistance in 1933. He also courageously defended numerous opponents of the Nazis.

However, after he was temporarily arrested in the summer of 1933 and, in the following autumn, a large part of the social democratic-left socialist resistance organization "Roter Stoßtrupp", which operated from Berlin and to which he had contact through one of his brothers, was exposed, "internal emigration" became the only viable option for Zinn. According to his own account, recruitment into the Wehrmacht in 1939 was followed by pre-military training in the SA Wehrmannschaft and, in 1941, wartime deployment in France and, from 1942, on the Eastern Front. His conspiratorial connections to Adolf Reichwein and Ernst von Harnack, and thus to the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, remained undiscovered. In 1945, with the rank of sergeant, he was finally taken prisoner of war by the Americans.

After working for a few days in Kassel as a district court director in October 1945, Georg August Zinn was appointed Hessian Minister of Justice at the end of that month, an office which he held, after a brief interruption in 1949/50, during his years as Minister President until 1963. Both the Hessian state constitution and the Basic Law clearly bear his signature. The principle of a militant democracy, clearly laid down here and there, resulted from the negative experience of the destruction of Weimar democracy, which had shown, according to Zinn in his pithy way, "where it leads when tolerance is practiced in the face of intolerance". He, who never tired of pointing out the provisional nature of our Basic Law, helped to develop the idea of the continued existence of the German nation in one state, as well as the decidedly welfare state character of the Federal Republic.

As Hesse's head of government since December 14, 1950, he rendered outstanding services to the creation of more and more jobs and new living space, the integration of refugees and expellees, who at times made up more than a quarter of Hesse's population, education policy and economic development. The same applies to the targeted infrastructural development of rural areas and, last but not least, the creation of a new identity for Hesse, for example by initiating the annual Hesse Day, which has been held every year since 1961. In 1964, he established the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal - following a suggestion by former Leuschner supporter and then DGB Chairman Willi Richter - to honor people "who have rendered outstanding services to democratic society and its institutions in the spirit" of that important social democratic trade unionist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. In 1971, this highest award of merit in Hesse was also bestowed on Zinn himself.

He also held many other relevant positions, such as Director of the State Personnel Office, President and Vice-President of the Bundesrat, Member of the State Parliament, briefly also Member of the Bundestag, long-standing SPD State Chairman and Chairman of the SPD district of Hesse-North and, on top of that, member of the SPD party executive. From 1947 to 1971, as a member of the Supervisory Board of Flughafen Frankfurt am Main AG and its Chairman, he rendered outstanding services to the development of the Rhine-Main Airport into Germany's largest airport. From 1964 to 1969, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Hessische Landesbank - Girozentrale. In addition, he has made a name for himself through numerous publications, primarily in the field of law, but above all through the commentary on the constitution of the state of Hesse, which he published together with the former Hessian Minister of Culture and Justice and former Federal Constitutional Court judge Erwin Stein, first in 1954 and then again in 1963. He has received many awards for his multifaceted, tireless political commitment, including honorary doctorates from the Faculty of Philosophy at Frankfurt's Johann Wolfgang Goethe University and the Faculty of Agriculture at Justus Liebig University in Giessen.

His legendary "Hesse Plans" and other structural development plans were a particular highlight of the "Zinn era", during which the federal state he led became synonymous with a model social democratic state par excellence. He had to resign from the office of Minister President on October 2, 1969 due to illness. He retained Wiesbaden as his main place of residence. At the age of almost 75, the honorary citizen of the cities of Kassel, Wiesbaden and Frankfurt died in the city of his birth. Wiesbaden's North Cemetery, on the other hand, is the burial place of the "most important political personality in Hesse's post-war history", according to his later successor in office, Roland Koch.

The names of a number of Hessian schools and other public buildings and streets commemorate the beneficial work of the former state father, who remained extraordinarily popular even after his death, as does the Georg August Zinn Medal, donated by Minister President Hans Eichel in 1997 in recognition of outstanding services to the promotion of art, culture, science and education in Hesse and to the common good of Hesse in general, as well as the Georg August Zinn Prize of the Hesse SPD, which was awarded for the first time in 2002. A comprehensive biographical tribute by the Kronberg historian Gerhard Beier, who died in 2000, was completed several years ago and is still awaiting publication. The state capital of Wiesbaden has once again paid tribute to him by renaming the section of street in front of the new state chancellery building on Kranzplatz Georg-August-Zinn-Straße.