Andreas Hermes

Andreas Hermes (18 July 1878 – 4 January 1964) was a German agricultural scientist and politician. In the Weimar Republic he was a member of several governments, serving as minister of food/nutrition and minister of finance for the Catholic Zentrum. During the rule of the Nazi Party, he was a member of the resistance, for which he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. After World War II, Hermes co-founded the Christian Democratic Union.

In the Weimar Republic, Hermes was a major influence on German agricultural policies. From the end of World War II to the late 1950s he was one of the people who shaped them.

Andreas Anton Hubert Hermes was born on 16 July 1878 in Cologne, then part of the Prussian Rhine province, as the son of Andreas Hermes (1832-1884), a railway worker, and his wife Theresia (1839-1905, née Schmitz). He was raised as a Catholic in Mönchengladbach, and lost his father at the age of 8.

Hermes studied agricultural science and philosophy at Bonn, Jena and Berlin. At that time he also travelled widely in Europe and South America, and he developed an interest in crossbreeding European with South American animal stock. In 1901 he became a teacher of agriculture at Cloppenburg and in 1902-04 was assistant to an animal breeder at Bonn. In 1905/06 Hermes was awarded a doctorate at Jena with a dissertation on the optimization of crop rotation and then became a research associate at the animal breeding department of the Deutsche Landwirtschaftsgesellschaft (German Agricultural Society) in Berlin. In 1911 Hermes was appointed director of the agricultural department of the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. With the start of World War I, he returned to Germany and worked first for the general staff, then in several functions in the bureaucracy in charge of the national food supply (Kriegsernährungswirtschaft), including organising the cultivation of oil seed in the Danube district and in the area near Lake Constance.

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