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Karl Joseph Wirth (; 6 September 1879 – 3 January 1956) was a German politician of the Catholic Centre Party who was chancellor of Germany from May 1921 to November 1922, during the early years of the Weimar Republic. He was also minister of four government departments between 1920 and 1931 (Foreign Affairs, Finance, Interior, and Occupied Territories). Wirth was strongly influenced by Christian social teaching throughout his political career.
He was named chancellor in May 1921 when Germany was facing difficult negotiations with the Allies of World War I over German war reparations. Wirth accepted the Allies' conditions and began a policy of fulfilment – an attempt to show that Germany was unable to afford the reparations payments by making the effort to meet them. He resigned after less than six months in protest against the partition of Upper Silesia by the League of Nations and formed a second, minority cabinet a few days later. Following the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by members of a right-wing terrorist group in April 1922, his government attempted to confront political violence with the Law for the Protection of the Republic. Wirth's second government resigned after just over a year when it was unable to expand its political base.
After his two terms as chancellor, Wirth continued to fight right-wing political forces as a Reichstag member and government minister. During the Nazism era he went into exile and worked with several anti-Nazi groups. Following the end of World War II, he opposed Konrad Adenauer's policy of integration with the West. Although he lived in West Germany, he had contacts with the Soviet Union and East Germany, the latter of which awarded him two prestigious honours. He died in his hometown of Freiburg in 1956.
From 1899 to 1906, he studied mathematics, natural sciences and economics at the University of Freiburg. He obtained his doctorate in mathematics in 1906 with the thesis "On the elementary divisors of a linear homogeneous substitution". From 1906 to 1913, he taught mathematics at a Realgymnasium (secondary school) in Freiburg. In 1909, he was a co-founder and first president of the Akademische Vinzenzkonferenz (Society of Saint Vincent de Paul), a charity run by laymen for the poor. Social issues were consistently his main concern after he entered politics.
At the start of World War I, Wirth volunteered for military service but for health reasons was deemed unfit. He then volunteered with the Red Cross and served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts until 1917, when he left after contracting pneumonia.
Wirth voted for the July 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution, which was sponsored by Matthias Erzberger, also of the Centre Party, and called for a negotiated peace without annexations. In the final year of the war, Wirth increasingly often criticized the policies of the imperial government and pushed for internal reforms.
In January 1919, Wirth was elected to both the Baden Constituent Assembly and the Weimar National Assembly, which wrote the new constitutions for the Republic of Baden and the Weimar Republic. After the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, when Chancellor Gustav Bauer of the MSPD resigned and was replaced by Hermann Müller (MSPD), Wirth became Germany's minister of Finance. He continued to hold the portfolio in the subsequent cabinet of Constantin Fehrenbach (Centre Party).
As Finance minister, Wirth continued the policies of his predecessor, Matthias Erzberger (Centre). They included the centralisation at the national level of the authority to tax and spend and the redistribution of taxes to lighten the burden on those with low to moderate incomes. Through ties with military leadership, he also saw that funds were provided to help begin secretly rearming Germany in contravention of the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Two members of the right-wing terrorist group Organisation Consul assassinated Matthias Erzberger on 26 August 1921 for his role in signing the Armistice of 11 November. At about the same time, the conflict between the Berlin government and the Bavarian government of Gustav Ritter von Kahr came to a head when President Friedrich Ebert placed Bavaria under a state of emergency. The Reich government was then able to disarm the paramilitary Bavarian Citizens' Defense groups (Einwohnerwehr), and Kahr, without their armed support, stepped down as Bavarian minister president.
The strife which arose out of the crisis in Bavaria had only just abated when in mid-October the League of Nations' announcement of the partition of Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland aroused considerable anger throughout Germany. Almost sixty percent of the vote in the March 1921 plebiscite in ethnically mixed Upper Silesia was in favour of staying part of Germany, but the heavily industrialised eastern part of the region was nevertheless awarded to Poland. Wirth believed that its severance from Germany would fatally affect Germany's capacity to pay its reparations.
On 22 October 1921, he resigned in protest over the partition. Three days later, President Friedrich Ebert once again asked him to form a government, which Wirth did on 26 October with the second Wirth cabinet. Because the DDP and German People's Party (DVP) had refused to accept the partition of Silesia or join any coalition that agreed to it, the SPD and Centre Party formed a minority government. On 26 October, Wirth gave a government statement in which he presented his new cabinet as a combination of trusted individuals, not as members of a coalition.
There stands the enemy, who drips his poison into the wounds of a people. There stands the enemy, and about it there is no doubt: the enemy is on the Right!On 21 July 1922, the Reichstag passed the Law for the Protection of the Republic on the initiative of the Wirth government. It increased the penalties for political assassinations and banned organisations opposed to the "constitutional republican form of government" along with their printed matter and meetings.
Wirth tried to extend his government's minority coalition to the right to include the DVP, but even his own Centre Party was becoming increasingly unhappy at having to work with the SPD, which had reunited with the more radical Independent Social Democrats (USPD) in September 1922. After the government lost a key vote on the grain levy in November, the government resigned. On 22 November, Wilhelm Cuno, a political independent, replaced Wirth as chancellor.
In April 1929, Wirth became minister for the Occupied Territories (the Rhineland region occupied by the Allies) in the second Müller cabinet. After the government's resignation in late March 1930, Wirth became minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Heinrich Brüning, the first of the presidential cabinets. Wirth's main task at the Interior Ministry was to try to hold back the growing power of the Nazis. He was highly popular with the Social Democrats and acted as mediator between them and the new government. In October 1931, he was pushed out of office and replaced by Wilhelm Groener on the personal initiative of President Paul von Hindenburg, who regarded Wirth as a leftist.
Unlike West Germany, East Germany paid Wirth a small amount of financial aid. In 1954 he was awarded the East German "Peace Medal" and received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1955. The CIA file "The background of Joseph Wirth" states that Wirth was a Soviet agent. According to a CIA document, Wirth claimed that he met with Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet secret police, in Berlin in December 1952. Wirth said Beria asked him to join the East German government.
Wirth died of heart failure in 1956, aged 76, in his hometown of Freiburg and was buried in the city's main cemetery.
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