Heinz Baumeister

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Heinz Baumeister (born February 7, 1902 in Krefeld , † March 13, 1969 in Hörde ) was a German state politician ( SPD / SED ), journalist and president of the Thuringian Chamber of Crafts .

Life

Baumeister came from a working class family in Krefeld . After attending primary school, he learned the profession of chemist , which he also practiced. At the age of 18 he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1924 he also joined the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold and two years later became its regional secretary for western Westphalia . He was a member of the editorial team for the magazine Resistance .

He was persecuted during the Nazi dictatorship : in 1933 he was taken into protective custody and remained unemployed after his release. In 1935 he was able to find employment in a motorcycle shop in Dortmund . Because he remained illegally anti-fascist , he was arrested again in 1937 and was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp from August 1938 to April 1945 .

In Buchenwald, together with Eugen Kogon and the Kapo of the typhus station Arthur Dietzsch , Baumeister was involved in the rescue of allied parachutists and secret service men in autumn 1944 by conspiratorially giving the officers at risk of death the identity of prisoners who had died of typhus. Stéphane Hessel was among those rescued . After the prisoners were liberated by the 3rd US Army , Baumeister was involved in the revision of the Buchenwald Manifesto in April 1945 and was a co-signatory. He joined the Association of Democratic Socialists founded by Hermann Brill , which soon became part of the SPD.

From 1945 to 1948, Baumeister was President of the Thuringian Chamber of Crafts. Since October 1946 he was a member of the Thuringian state parliament and in it chairman of the committee for economy, trade and supply. Although he became a member of the SED in 1946 after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD , he remained connected to the supporters of a social democratic course in the party and was therefore criticized by party leaders and also attacked in the press, among other things because of his different positions on expropriation processes . In 1948 he left the SBZ and went back to the Ruhr area , where he founded a freight forwarding company. According to Steffen Kachel's investigation, Baumeister's departure led to further attacks against supporters of social democratic convictions who remained in the SED.

literature

  • Wolfgang Röll: Social Democrats in Buchenwald Concentration Camp 1937–1945 , Wallstein-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89244-417-x .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jochen Lengemann . Thuringian state parliaments 1919-1952. Boehlau Verlag 2014 ISBN 9783412221799
  2. ↑ cf. Eugen Kogon: The SS state . The system of the German concentration camps , 1974, p. 245 ff.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Röll: Social Democrats in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp 1937–1945 , Wallstein-Verlag, 2000, p. 245
  4. ↑ Steffen Kachel: A red-red special path? Social Democrats and Communists in Thuringia 1919 to 1949 , = publications of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, Small Series Volume 29, p. 539, ISBN 978-3-412-20544-7
personal data
SURNAME Builder, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German state politician (SPD, SED), journalist and association chairman
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Krefeld
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1969
Place of death Hear