Andreas Hermes

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, but never executed thanks to the intervention of his wife. After World War II, he co-founded the Christian Democratic Union in East Germany.

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. 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.

From 1954-58, he was president, later until his death honorary chairman, of the European Confederation of Agriculture (CEA). Simultaneously he served as vice-president of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers.