Andreas Hermes (16 July 1878 – 4 January 1964) was a German agricultural scientist and politician. In the Weimar Republic, he was a member of several governments, serving as minister of food/nutrition and minister of finance for the Catholic Zentrum. During the rule of the Nazi Party, Hermes was part of the right-wing resistance, for which he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. After World War II, he co-founded the Christian Democratic Union.
Early life
Hermes was born on 16 July 1878 in Cologne, then part of the Prussian Rhine province, as the son of Andreas Hermes (1832–1884), a railway worker, and his wife Theresia (1839–1905, née Schmitz). He was raised as a Catholic in Mönchengladbach, and lost his father at the age of 8.
Hermes studied agricultural science and philosophy at Bonn, Jena and Berlin. At that time he also travelled widely in Europe and South America, and he developed an interest in crossbreeding European with South American animal stock. In 1901 he became a teacher of agriculture at Cloppenburg, and from 1902 to 1904 was assistant to an animal breeder at Bonn. In 1905/06 Hermes was awarded a doctorate at Jena with a dissertation on the optimization of crop rotation and then became a research associate at the animal breeding department of the Deutsche Landwirtschaftsgesellschaft (German Agricultural Society) in Berlin. In 1911 Hermes was appointed director of the agricultural department of the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. With the start of World War I, he returned to Germany and worked first for the general staff, then in several functions in the bureaucracy in charge of the national food supply (Kriegsernährungswirtschaft), including organising the cultivation of oil seed in the Danube district and in the area near Lake Constance.
Weimar Republic
After the end of the war, in 1919, Hermes headed the department on agriculture and forestry of the Reichswirtschaftsministerium (Ministry of Economic Affairs). He joined the Catholic Zentrum. In the first Müller cabinet Hermes became Reichsernährungsminister (Minister for Nutrition/Food) in March 1920. Also in 1920, Hermes married Anna Schaller (b. 1894). They had three sons and one (or according to a different source, two) daughters.
During his period in office, the Reichsernährungsministerium was restructured according to his suggestions. In 1922 Hermes in addition to his post as Reichsernährungsminister became Minister of Finance. After a short while he resigned from the former post but remained in charge of Finance. He stayed in that office until the resignation of the cabinet of Wilhelm Cuno in August 1923.
Whilst serving as a minister, Hermes managed the transition from technocratic expert to politician. In 1924 he was elected for the Zentrum to the Prussian Diet and in 1928 to the Reichstag. In 1927 he was a member of the German delegation at the International Economic Conference at Geneva. In 1928 he led the German delegation in trade negotiations with Poland. At the same time, Hermes was active in the lobbying/umbrella organizations of the German agricultural industry. In 1928, he became president of the Association of the German Farmers Associations and after the economic crisis of the Great Depression started, this organization became part of the "Green Front". In 1930, he became president of the Reichsverband der deutschen landwirtschaftlichen Genossenschaften-Raiffeisen (National Association of German Agricultural Cooperatives).
Nazi Germany
In March 1933, even before the passage of the Ermächtigungsgesetz he resigned from the Reichstag in protest against Nazi policies. He was arrested, charged and, on 12 July, sentenced to four months in prison for his opposition to the Nazis. He then was either affected by an amnesty, or released as his time served in jail counted towards the sentence, according to different sources. He resigned from his positions in the agricultural organizations and in 1936 emigrated to Colombia. There he worked as an economic advisor to the government in Bogota from 1936–39. He returned to Germany to collect his family, but the eruption of World War II prevented his departure back to South America.
From 1942, Hermes was in touch with members of the resistance like Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and the Kreisau Circle. Immediately after 20 July 1944 he was arrested and on 11 January 1945 sentenced to death for being an active member of the conspiracy to kill Hitler. In one of Goerdeler's lists he was named as a post-putsch minister for agriculture. However, his wife succeeded in delaying his execution until the Red Army occupied Berlin.