A Brief History
The roots of the German Ordnungspolitik lie in the Freiburger Schule (Freiburg School) and will always be connected with the names of Walter Eucken, Alfred Müller-Amack, Franz Böhm, Hans Großmann-Doerth, and of course Ludwig Erhardt. In the early 1930s, Eucken, Böhm, and Großmann-Doerth studied and taught the problems of a free society with private power at the University of Freiburg. In today’s academic language one would probably call their collaboration an interdisciplinary research of lawyers and economists. In 1937 this collaboration led to a publication series Ordnung und Wirtschaft (“Order and the Economy”), which is recognized as the birth of the Freiburger Schule. Some members of this School not only discussed academically the rules of an economy that is based on individual freedom, but also took part in the intellectual opposition to the totalitarian Nazi regime. After the war many became involved in politics and the government of the emerging Federal Republic of Germany.
In 1948, Ludwig Erhardt was appointed Director of the Administration for the Economy of the United Economic Area (Bizone), which would later become West Germany. On 20 June 1948 he then implemented Germany’s currency reform from the Reichsmark to the Deutsche Mark in the western zones of Germany. Without coordinating with the military governments he liberalized the price control mechanism as well as the associated rationing and government control of the economy. This day marked the beginning of the German Social Market Economy and was followed by the Wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle) that made Germany the world’s second biggest economy until the end of the 1950s.