Willi Birkelbach

Willi Birkelbach CBE (12 January 1913 – 17 July 2008) was a West German politician (SPD). He was a member of the West German Bundestag (national parliament) between 1949 and 1964. Between 1952 and 1964 he also served as an increasingly prominent Member of the European Parliament (and its precursor body).

In 1971 he became the first ever Ombudsman for Data protection in the State of Hessen. The title of the post has changed, most recently in Germany, to Datenschutzbeauftragter (loosely, "Data Protection officer"). Hessen was the first state in West Germany to appoint a "Datenschutzbeauftragter", which means that Willi Birkelbach was the first Data Protection Officer/Commissioner/Registrar in the German Federal Republic.

Biography Early years Willi Birkelbach was born in Höchst (today part of Frankfurt am Main), the son of Johann Birkelbach (1880–1964) by his marriage to Luise Schäfer (1888–1978). Slightly unusually for the time, Willi Birkelnach was the child of a "mixed marriage": Johann Birkelbach was from a Catholic family while Luise Birkelbach was a Protestant. There were two significant gaps in his employment record during the twelve National Socialist years which relate to his political involvement.

Between 1953 and 1958, he represented the IG Metall union as a member of the supervisory board at Mannesmann AG. Then, till 1978, he took a similar position at the Bochum Steel Works, serving between 1968 and 1978 as deputy board chairman. On 10 October 1938, Birkelbach was arrested by the Gestapo. He spent those thirty months in prisons in Butzbach and Münster.

After 1945 National Parliament In August 1949, the newly launched West German Republic held the first democratic general election in which Germans had participated since 1932. Birkelbach was elected an SPD member of it, representing the Frankfurt south-east electoral district, gaining slightly less than 40% of the constituency vote and comfortably out-polling his CDU and FPD rival candidates. He remained a Bundestag member till retiring from the chamber on 30 September 1964. Due to the national election results during those fifteen years he was always in opposition, however.

European parliament Between 1952 and 1964, he was also a member - and from 1959 to 1964 chairman - of the Socialist group in the European Parliament. Following the report Spain made a formal request for talks, Birkelbach became the first European Parliamentarian to pose an oral question to the commission, questioning the commission's position regarding the accession of non-democratic countries. A few months later the report was used to support the rejection of Francoist Spain as a membership candidate. By 1958 Birkelbach was finding himself increasingly at odds with the party leadership over the Godesberg process, and that year he did not seek re-election to the SPD national party executive.

He nevertheless remained actively engaged with the party. In 2005, now more than ninety years old, he was still appearing as a speaker in Frankfurt during the General Election campaign.

Other public offices From 1964 to 1969, Birkelbach was employed as a secretary of state and, in effect, the head of the State Chancelry of the State of Hessen. During this time he employed Christel Guillaume as a senior typist-secretary, with a desk directly outside his own office. It later emerged that Christel Guillaume was working for East German intelligence, and in 1974 she was sentenced to an eight-year prison term for espionage. She was sent back to East Germany where she was feted as a peace-scout ("Kundschafterin des Friedens") in 1981 as part of a wider "spy-swap". Simitis was installed as Birkelbach's deputy and there was a widespread perception that Simitis was the real moving force in the new department, but Simitis, despite having been educated in West Germany, was Greek. (Greece was not yet a member of the European Community.) In 1975 Spiros Simitis belatedly obtained West German citizenship and took over as Chief Data Protection Officer for the State of Hessen. Birkelbach retired. But it was Birkelbach who enjoyed the distinction of being the first Data Protection Commissioner anywhere in the German Federal Republic.

Awards and honours (selection)