Erhard, Ludwig

STATESMAN (GERMANY)
BORN 4 Feb 1897, Fürth, Bayern: Ludwig-Erhard-Straße 5 - DIED 5 May 1977, Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen
GRAVE LOCATION Gmund am Tegernsee, Bayern: Bergfriedhof

Ludwig Erhardt was the son of the businessman Wilhelm Philipp Erhard. During his youth he suffered from spinal polio which left him with a deformed foot. He was trained as a retail merchant before he entered the Bavarian Army during the First World War. He was wounded severely near Ypres in September 1918. From 1919 to 1922 he studied at the Handelshochschule Nürnberg, followed by business administration and sociology at Frankfurt University. In 1923 he married the economist Luise Schuster (1893-1975, born Lotter).

From 1928 to 1942 he was a scientific assistant in Nürnberg. In 1945 the American government made him Minister of State for Trade and Industry in Bavaria under Wilhelm Hoegner. In 1949 he entered the German Bundestag and he was Federal Minister of Economics under Adenauer from 1949 to 1963. In 1963 he succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor. In 1966 he resigned and in 1967 he also withdrew from his chairmanship of the CDU party. He continued to be a member of the Bundestag and he founded the Ludwig Erhard Foundation in 1967.

Erhard was known to smoke up to twenty cigars a day. He died in 1977 in Bonn of heart failure and was buried in Gmund am Tegernsee in Bavaria.

Related persons
• was painted by Annigoni, Pietro

Images

The grave of Ludwig Erhard at the Bergfriedhof, Gmund am Tegernsee.
Picture by Androom (03 Sep 2013)

 

Sources
Süddeutsche Zeitung
The Times
Ludwig Erhard – Wikipedia


Erhardt, Heinz

Published: 10 May 2018
Last update: 29 Mar 2022