SCHAFFER, HANS

SCHAFFER, HANS (1886–1967), bureaucrat; State Secretary in the Finance Ministry during the early years of the depression.* Born to a Jewish industrialist in Breslau (now Poland's* Wroclaw), he studied economics and history before taking a doctorate in law. He had founded a legal practice in Breslau before he served at the front (1917–1918) in World War I. Although Scha¨ffer was politically unattached, he was a convinced democrat and formed his closest ties with the SPD. Working from December 1918 with the Economics Office (soon renamed the Economics Ministry), he promoted the efforts of the first Socialization Commission.* In the spring of 1919 he assisted the National Assembly's* Constitutional Committee and thereafter acted as Geheimrat until his appointment in August 1923 as ministerial director in the Economics Ministry. A patron of free-market economics, he helped draft the Cartel Law of November 1923. His expertise was repeatedly employed at the decade's reparations* summits; concurrently, he helped secure important international loans for Germany. When Paul Moldenhauer* became Finance Minister in 1929, Scha¨ffer joined the ministry as State Secretary. Although he urged tighter fiscal policies in the last months of Hermann Mu¨ller's* cabinet and initially promoted Heinrich Bru¨- ning's* economic program, he gradually deemed Bru¨ning too inflexible. Estranged from the Chancellor by mid-1931, he marked his dissension by resigning on 15 May 1932, two weeks before Bru¨ning's dismissal. In June 1932 Scha¨ffer became Generaldirektor for the troubled Ullstein Verlag*; at the insistence of Goebbels* he quit his position the next March. Emigrating to Sweden, he helped redevelop that country's Kreuger Company. Especially interested in combatting cartels,* he took Swedish citizenship in 1938 and was active well into the postwar era as an economics consultant.