Theodor Steltzer

Theodor Hans Friedrich Steltzer (17 December 1885 – 27 October 1967) was a Prussian military officer and civil servant during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. He was removed from office and prosecuted by the Nazis in 1933. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht during World War II, he became active in the German resistance to Nazism by joining the Kreisau Circle. After the failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944, Steltzer was arrested and condemned to death in early 1945. Despite this, he survived the war, became a politician in the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and served as the first minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein from 1946 to 1947. After leaving office, he was active in several organizations dealing with public and international affairs.

Early life and military service in the German Empire Steltzer was born in Trittau in Schleswig-Holstein. After earning his Abitur from the Johanneum in Lüneburg in 1902, he joined the Royal Prussian Army as an officer cadet in April 1904. In 1907, he took a leave of absence to study political science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but in 1909, he resumed his military career as a battalion adjutant in Göttingen. From 1912 to 1914, he attended the Prussian War College in Berlin. After the outbreak of World War I, he was initially deployed near Liège and then transferred to the eastern front where he was severely wounded on 31 December 1914. After recovering from his wounds, he resumed service on the staff of the Field Railway Service in Charleville-Mézières in 1915. In 1917, he became a general staff officer with the Field Railway Service at the Oberste Heeresleitung (supreme army command).

Civil service career in the Weimar Republic After leaving military service at the end of the war, Steltzer entered the Prussian civil service. On 1 September 1920, he was appointed the acting Landrat (district administrator) for the Rendsburg district in Schleswig, an appointment made permanent on 1 February 1921. A capable administrator, he served as an impartial technocrat for the next twelve years, and joined no political party.

In 1947 and 1948, Steltzer participated in meetings of the , a think-tank of some forty politicians, writers and intellectuals across the entire political spectrum, who advocated for a fundamental reorganization of Germany based on the spirit of the resistance movement. From 1950 to 1952, he headed the Institute for the Promotion of Public Affairs in Frankfurt am Main. From 1955 to 1960, he served as president of the German Commission for UNESCO and on the German Council on Foreign Relations, which he had co-founded. Steltzer died at Munich in October 1967.