Hermann Dietrich

Hermann Robert Dietrich was a German politician of the liberal German Democratic Party and served as a minister during the Weimar Republic.

Finance Minister of Germany

In 1930, Dietrich succeeded Paul Moldenhauer as Finance Minister of the Weimar Republic. In the midst of the Great Depression, Dietrich became the "chief proponent" of government contracts in 1930 in an attempt to offset the drastic increase in unemployment. Because the contracts were contingent on the reduction of prices, he and the Provisional National Economic Council had to authorise the reduction of wages in the German industrial community.
Dietrich, along with the Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and Minister of Labour Adam Stegerwald, all of whom had studied economics, believed that accelerating the pace of agricultural resettlement would solve unemployment. He was initially opposed to the deflationary policy pushed by Brüning, but later changed his position and said it was a "necessary measure" along with the cut in civil workers' salaries.
During President Paul von Hindenburg's bid for re-election, Dietrich was one of few elites in the cabinet barred from speaking at the president's candidacy campaigns for allegedly being "too far left".