Hermann Warmbold

Hermann Warmbold (1876 to 1976) was a German independent politician and academic who served as Reich Minister of Economics in the Weimar Republic from 1931 to 1933, with a brief break in 1932. Born at Klein Himstedt in the Kingdom of Prussia, he studied at Göttingen and Bonn, was Secretary General of the Agricultural and Forestry Association in Lüneburg from 1907 to 1911 and headed the Chamber of Agriculture in Hanover. He worked as an agricultural organizer in Estonia in 1911, headed the Department of Economic Administration at the Agricultural University of Berlin from 1913, directed the University of Hohenheim from 1917 to 1919 and was Professor of Agricultural Economics from 1915 to 1919, setting up a farm advisory service and a grassland system that became internationally known. He was Prussian Minister of Agriculture in 1921, a board member of I.G. Farben from 1926 to 1931, and in 1931 became Reich Minister of Economics in Heinrich Brüning's cabinet, concentrating on the financial crisis of the Depression. In 1945 he moved to Chile to help its government with agricultural affairs.