Josef Müller (CSU politician)

Josef Müller (27 March 1898–12 September 1979), also known as "Ochsensepp", was a German politician.

Born in Steinwiesen, Upper Franconia, he entered the legal profession. During the Weimar Republic he became politically active as a member of the Bavarian People’s Party.

During the Nazi period he worked as an attorney defending many Nazi opponents. He also was part of the Catholic resistance and was in contact to resistance figures in the military such as Admiral Canaris, Hans von Dohnanyi and Hans Oster.

In 1943 he was arrested and interned at the concentration camp Flossenbürg. Unlike fellow inmates Canaris, Oster and Bonhoeffer, who were executed in April 1945, he survived the war and was liberated from captivity along with 138 other “special prisoners ("Sonderhäflinge")” and “kin prisoners ("Sippenhäftlinge"),” persons of prominence the Nazi SS had hauled off in the final days of the war to Niederdorf, South Tirol, where they were to be hidden and used as bargaining chips. [Richardi, Hans-Günter: "SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung—Die Verschleppung prominenter KZ-Häftlinge aus Deustchland nach Südtirol" (Hostages of the SS in the Alpine Reduit Area: How concentration-camp prisoners of prominence were dragged off from Germany to South Tyrol). Bozen: Edition Raetia, 2006. ISBN 88-7283-229-2]

After the war, he advocated forming a new Christian party of both Catholics and Protestants. With Adam Stegerwald, he was a co-founders of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU). Müller belonged to the more liberal Franconian wing of the party and was the main opponent of the conservative Old-Bavarian wing under Alois Hundhammer.

After the CSU had won the first post-war elections in 1946, Hundhammer opposed Müller's nomination as minister-president of Bavaria and proposed that Hans Ehard be elected as a compromise candidate instead. Once elected, Ehard appointed Hundhammer as minister of culture, but in 1947 Müller entered the cabinet as well as minister of justice and from 1950 onwards, he also was deputy prime minister. He resigned from the government in 1952.

From 1946 to 1949 Müller also was the party’s first chairman. He was one of the patrons of the young Franz Josef Strauß.

He died on September 12, 1979, in Munich.

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