Heinrich Hellwege

Heinrich Peter Hellwege (18 August 1908 – 4 October 1991) was a German politician for the German-Hanoverian Party, DP and CDU. Hellwege was Federal Minister for Affairs of the Federal Council from 1949 to 1955 and Minister-President of Lower Saxony from 1955 to 1959. When he left secondary school in 1926, he started to work as a commercial clerk in Hamburg until in 1933 when he joined the family business for six years. During World War II, he served with the Luftwaffe. After the war, Hellwege turned into a political entrepreneur who founded a political party, the Niedersächsische Landespartei (NLP), later renamed to the DP, and began his own political career. The first and the last position held by Hellwege was M.P. in the state legislature of Lower Saxony from 1947 to 1949 and from 1959 to 1963. Between 1947 and 1961, he was national chairman of the German Party (Deutsche Partei). When the DP started to fade away, Hellwege joined the Christian Democratic Union from 1961 to 1979 without ever being a candidate for that party.