Education
Seebohm attended school in Dresden, Saxony and studied mining at the universities of Munich and Berlin-Charlottenburg.
Seebohm attended school in Dresden, Saxony and studied mining at the universities of Munich and Berlin-Charlottenburg.
He was Federal Minister of Transport for 17 years and Vice-Chancellor of West Germany in 1966. Passing the Staatsexamen in 1928, he worked as a junior civil servant at Halle and obtained a doctorate level degree from the Technical College of Berlin in 1932. He became a mining director at Silesian Gleiwitz and Bytom and upon the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938/39 supervised the "Aryanization" of the mines at Královské Poříčí (Königswerth).
After World World War II, he joined the regionalist Lower Saxon State Party in the British occupation zone under Heinrich Hellwege, which in 1947 was renamed German Party (DP).
From 1946 until 1948 he held the office of Minister for Reconstruction, Labour and Health in Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf"s Lower Saxon state government. In the run-up to the first federal election of 1949, he and his party fellows Hellwege and von Merkatz negotiated a national conservative alliance with the Deutsche Rechtspartei and Hessian National Democrats, which however were aborted by the British occupation forces.
In 1952, Seebohm was elected DP chairman, but refused to assume office. From 20 September 1949 until 30 November 1966 he also served as Federal Minister for Transport, firstly under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who forced him to join the Christian Democratic Union in 1960 as he wouldn"t support the DP any longer.
Then under Ludwig Erhard, under whom he ultimately, but briefly, served as Vice-Chancellor.
From 1959 Seebohm acted as spokesperson of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft (Sudeten German Homeland Association) of German expellees from Czechoslovakia, where he held his so-called "weekend speeches". In line with West German government policy at the time, he questioned the borders of Germany, referring to the borders of the 1937 German Reich as base of any border revision and stating that Germans should also never forget about the eastern territories lost after World War I according to the resolutions of the Treaty of Versailles, while at the same time even demanding restoration of the 1938 Munich Agreement. Seebohm died a few months after his retirement and is buried in the Bad Pyrmont cemetery.
When the grand coalition under Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger took office, he left the cabinet, having served as a federal minister for seventeen years, a record beaten only by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher"s 23 years (with an interruption in 1982) but as of 2011 still the record for uninterrupted service.
Seebohm became president of the chamber of commerce at Braunschweig and was a member of the Landtag state assembly of Lower Saxony from 1946 until 1951. From 1949 until his death he was a member of the Bundestag for the constituency of Hamburg-Harburg.