Hermann Dietrich

In 1930, Dietrich succeeded Paul Moldenhauer as Finance Minister of the Weimar Republic. In the midst of the Great Depression, Dietrich became the "chief proponent" of government contracts in 1930 in an attempt to offset the drastic increase in unemployment. Because the contracts were contingent on the reduction of prices, he and the Provisional National Economic Council had to authorise the reduction of wages in the German industrial community.

Dietrich, along with the economists Heinrich Brüning and Adam Stegerwald, firmly believed that accelerating the pace of the agricultural sector at the cost of Germany's industrial capacity would solve unemployment.

During President Paul von Hindenburg's bid for re-election, Dietrich was one of few elites in the cabinet barred from speaking at the president's candidacy campaigns for allegedly being "too far left".