Siegfried Aufhäuser

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Siegfried Aufhäuser

Siegfried Aufhäuser (born May 1, 1884 in Augsburg , † December 6, 1969 in Berlin ) was a German trade union leader and social democrat.

Life

Aufhäuser was the son of a Jewish spirits manufacturer and hops trader and completed a commercial apprenticeship after attending secondary school and higher commercial school. In 1908 he was a co-founder of the Democratic Association and its board member. During his apprenticeship , Aufhäuser, who had become an SPD member in 1912, organized himself in a union and was thus appointed to the management of the “Federation of Technical-Industrial Officials” in 1913.

Aufhäuser worked on the amalgamation of the various social democratically oriented employee associations of his time and in 1915 founded the “Working Group of Independent Employee Associations”. In 1917 he became executive chairman, from 1921 to 1933 also the full-time head of the successor organization General Freelance Employees' Association , which can be considered a parallel organization of the General German Trade Union Confederation . The chairmen of these two associations, Carl Legien and Siegfried Aufhäuser, worked closely together (e.g. in the organization of strikes during the Kapp Putsch ).

After becoming a member of the USPD in 1917 , he rejoined the SPD in 1922, like the majority of the members who remained after the party split in 1920. From 1921 to 1933 he was a member of the Reichstag and from 1920 of the Provisional Reich Economic Council . In 1921 he became vice-president of the Berliner Arbeiterbank and from 1922 to 1925 he was a member of the State Court for the Protection of the Republic. Between 1928 and 1933 he was also an expert at the International Labor Office in Geneva.

exile

After the National Socialists came to power , after a few arrests, he fled to Prague via Saarbrücken , where he worked within the framework of the SoPaDe and is considered within this organization to be a supporter of the popular front idea , i.e. the union with the socialists of communist character against Hitler's Germany . Within the SoPaDe, this idea did not win a majority. In 1935 Aufhäuser was excluded from the board together with Karl Böchel and joined the Revolutionary Socialists of Germany (RSD) founded by Max Seydewitz . In December 1936 he signed the appeal to the German people of the “Popular Front Committee” in Paris, which became known as the Lutetia Circle . As a result of the Munich Agreement, he moved to Paris and then emigrated to New York in 1939 . There he worked as a freelance writer and journalist. Among other things, he was a member of the social democratic exile organization German Labor Delegation . In May 1944 he helped found the Council for a Democratic Germany (CDG). Belonging to the Neu Beginnen group , he was active in the educational work of the émigré clubs and, until 1944, editor of the Aufbau .

return

In 1951 he returned to Germany and in 1952 became chairman of the regional association of the German employees' union (today ver.di ) in Berlin. He gave up this post in 1959 at the age of 75. In 1964 he was the city elder of Berlin.

In 1984 a street was laid out in Hanover-Wettbergen and named after him.

He lived in the Eichkamp settlement on the Grunewald before 1933 and again after 1945.

Siegfried Aufhäuser is buried with his wife in the Jewish cemetery in Freiburg im Breisgau .

Publications

  • Ideology and tactics of the white-collar movement (presentation at the 4th Afa trade union congress), Leipzig 1931, pp. 3–23.

literature

  • Eckhard Hansen, Florian Tennstedt (Eds.) U. a .: Biographical lexicon on the history of German social policy from 1871 to 1945 . Volume 2: Social politicians in the Weimar Republic and during National Socialism 1919 to 1945. Kassel University Press, Kassel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7376-0474-1 , p. 5 f. ( Online , PDF; 3.9 MB).
  • Gunter Lange : Siegfried Aufhäuser (1884–1969). A life for the white-collar movement. A biography (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 5). Metropol, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-096-7 .
  • Günter Lange: How the employees got their rights. In: ver.di publik 04/2009, p. 17. ISSN  1610-7691
  • Siegfried Mielke (Ed.) With the collaboration of Marion Goers, Stefan Heinz , Matthias Oden, Sebastian Bödecker: Unique. Lecturers, students and representatives of the German University of Politics (1920–1933) in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 , p. 346 ff.
  • Reich Manual of the German Society. The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. First volume. Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, p. 41, ISBN 3-598-30664-4
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographies on German history from the beginning to 1945 . Berlin 1991, p. 29 f.
  2. ↑ Helga Grebing, Siegfried Heimann (ed.): Arbeiterbewetzung in Berlin, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2012, p. 89
personal data
SURNAME Aufhäuser, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trade union leaders and politicians (SPD, USPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH augsburg
DATE OF DEATH 6th December 1969
Place of death Berlin