Hamburger, Ernest, 1890-1980

Government official.

Ernst (or Ernest) Hamburger (1890-1980) was born on December 30, 1890 to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. After attending Gymnasium, he went on to study at the universities of Berlin and Munich, receiving his doctorate in history at the former institution in 1913. After a brief spell as a Gymnasium teacher, he was drafted into the army and served at the front during the First World War.

After the war, Hamburger became active in the Social-Democratic Party. He began journalistic work for the party in 1919 and continued it through 1933. In 1919, Hamburger was hired as a public-relations assistant in the office of the Silesian Provincial Governor in Breslau. He rose through the hierarchy of the Prussian bureaucracy, becoming by 1932 a senior official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in Berlin.

In 1926, Hamburger was elected to the Prussian Parliament on the Social-Democratic ticket from the Breslau constituency. He was re-elected until 1933. Hamburger was a member of the executive committee (Vorstand) of the Social-Democratic delegation in the Prussian Parliament. His most noted role in this position was the development of a scheme by which an acting Weimar coalition government could continue to rule in Prussia, even after the Nazi electoral victory of 1932 made an ordered parliamentary regime impossible. The state of affairs thus created led to the famous "Preussenschlag," the expulsion of the Prussian government by the national government under the leadership of Franz von Papen in August of 1932.

Following the Nazi seizure of power in March 1933, Hamburger was forced to flee the country. He went to France where he supported himself by freelance journalism, and by work at the "Institut de droit compare" and the "Institut de science de la presse" in Paris.

In 1940, Hamburger was once more forced to flee from the Nazis. Illegally crossing the Pyrenees, he came via Spain and Portugal to the United States. Arriving in New York, he lectured at the New School for Social Research and at the French university in exile, the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes.

In 1948, Hamburger was hired by the United Nations and worked as an official I the Division of Human Rights, eventually becoming editor of the Human Rights Yearbook. Following his retirement in 1955, he continued to work for the U.N. as a consultant, providing an extensive commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In his retirement, Hamburger lectured extensively, both in the United States and abroad. As one of the last surviving leaders of the Weimar Republic, Hamburger received a growing number of inquiries from scholars and students interested I modern German history and carried out an extensive correspondence with them.

In 1962, Hamburger became a fellow of the Leo Baeck Institute and a few years later a member of the Institute’s Executive Committee. The final years of his life were taken up with Jewish themes. His scholarly study of Jewish politicians and civil servants in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, "Juden im oeffentlichen Leben Deutschlands: Regierungsmitglieder Beamte und Parliamentarier in der monarchischen Zeit (1848-1918)", (Tuebingen, 1968). The book appeared to highly favorable reviews. Hamburger was determined to produce a second volume, dealing with Jewish politicians and civil servants in the Weimar Republic. He worked on this project in the last years of his life but the bulk of the material proved more than he could deal with to his satisfaction. He completed a much abbreviated manuscript, covering Jewish government ministers and Jews as voters, just a few weeks before his death on April 2, 1980.