August-Martin Euler

August-Martin Euler (9 May 1908 in Kassel – 4 February 1966 in Brussels) was a German politician (FDP, later FVP and German Party). He was state chairman of the FDP in Hesse from 1947 to 1956, a member of the German Bundestag from 1949 to 1958, and chairman of the FDP parliamentary group there from 1951 to 1952. In 1956, he led a breakaway from the FDP faction, the so-called Euler Group.

After graduating from high school, Euler studied law in Marburg and then worked in various legal positions from 1936 to 1944. Since 1939, he has been the general representative for chemistry in Berlin as legal counsel for IG Farben. Euler, who had undergone training with the police, was drafted into the SS Police Regiment 2 Brandenburg on 29 November 1944, as a police officer for the Waffen-SS.

In 1945–46, he was district administrator in the Hersfeld district. He then worked as a lawyer. In 1953, he belonged to Club 53 around Arnold Bode. In September 1958, he became Director General of the Supply Department of EURATOM.

He was the father of the later Hamburg FDP parliamentary group leader, Maja Stadler-Euler.

Euler was one of the co-founders of the Liberal Democratic Party, later the FDP, in Kassel in 1945 and then throughout Hesse on 29 December 1945. In 1946, he initially became state manager, and in June 1947, he became state chairman of the FDP as the successor to Georg Ludwig Fertsch. He held the office until he left the party in 1956. At the founding party conference of the FDP in Heppenheim, Euler was elected to the executive board of the federal party. At the 1949 federal party conference of the FDP in Bremen, he wanted to enforce a commitment to rearmament but failed due to the anti-militarist sentiment of the majority of delegates.

At the meeting of the Federal Main Committee of the FDP on 21 September 1950, he spoke out in favor of resolving not only the incompatibility of membership in the FDP with membership in the Association of those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime but also with membership in the German Peace Society (DFG). While the first demand was passed with a clear majority because of the KPD's decisive influence on the VVN, the proposal regarding the peace society failed; after all, Harald Abatz [de], an FDP member, was the federal chairman of the DFG. At the federal party conference in September 1951 in Munich, he ran against the previous deputy federal chairman, Hermann Schäfer, and was narrowly defeated by 114 votes to 139.

Together with Hans-Joachim von Merkatz, Euler advocated a rigorous end to denazification in 1950. Both sought to exonerate the so-called main culprits and those accused of all current or impending sanctions at the time.

Euler was one of the strictest representatives of the citizen bloc orientation of the FDP. In 1952, he called for the Baden-Württemberg FDP/DVP, which he described as demi-Marxists, to be excluded from the party after Reinhold Maier entered into a coalition with the SPD in the southwestern state.