BADT, HERMANN

BADT, HERMANN (1887–1946), German civil servant and constitutional lawyer, active in the Zionist movement. He was the son of the classical scholar Benno Badt. Born in Breslau, he maintained Orthodox traditions and joined the mizrachi party . From 1905 to 1908 he studied law in Breslau and Munich. During World War I Badt served as Feldkriegsgerichtsrat. In 1919, he was the first Jew in Prussia to be admitted to the civil service after the revolution of 1918, first as Regierungsassessor, then as a Regierungsrat in the German foreign office. From 1922 to 1926 he was a Social Democratic member of the Prussian Diet and then became the Ministerialdirektor in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in charge of constitutional affairs. In 1932 he represented Prussia before the Staatsgerichtshof (State Court) of the German Reich in its unsuccessful legal action against Chancellor von Papen, who had deposed the legal government and instituted himself as a dictatorial "Reichskommissar" (Reich Commissioner) in Prussia. After his dismissal in 1933, he emigrated to Palestine, which he had visited several times before. Among other enterprises, he founded the Kinneret company to promote middle-class settlement on the land where kibbutz Ein Gev was founded. -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration, 1 (1980), 31; Y. Ilsar, in: TAJ, 20 (1991), 339–62. (Encyclopaedia Hebraica / Marcus Pyka (2nd ed.)