Gustav Heinemann was a German politician. He was Mayor of the city of Essen from 1946 to 1949, West German Minister of the Interior from 1949 to 1950, Minister of Justice from 1966 to 1969 and President of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974.
Education
Having finished grammar school in 1917, Heinemann briefly became a soldier in the First World War, but on account of severe illness he was not sent to the front.
The friendships Heinemann formed during his student years often lasted for a lifetime. Among his friends were such different people as Wilhelm Röpke, who was to become one of the leading figures of economic liberalism, Ernst Lemmer, later a trade unionist and also a Christian Democrat, and Viktor Agartz, a Marxist.
Politics
As a student, Heinemann belonged to the Reichsbund deutscher demokratischer Studenten, the student organization of the liberal German Democratic Party which strongly supported the democracy of the Weimar Republic.n 1930 Heinemann joined the Christlich-Sozialer Volksdienst ("Christian Social People's Service"), but he voted for the Social Democratic Party in 1933 to try to prevent a victory of the NSDAP.In 1952, founded his own political party, the All-German People's Party (Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei).