Adolf Meinberg

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Adolf Meinberg (born October 3, 1893 in Wickede near Dortmund , † April 11, 1955 in Kohlstädt ) was a German labor leader and publicist. As one of the most famous communists in the Ruhr area , he took over command of the city of Dortmund during the Ruhr uprising in March 1920 . In 1922 he was expelled from the KPD . He became a freelance author and in 1927 dealt critically with Carl Severing's account of the events during the Ruhr uprising. He survived the National Socialist era as a woodworker, sales representative and accountant .

Life

Until the revolution of 1918

Meinberg was born as the son of a miner in the Dortmund working-class suburb of Wickede - Asseln . His father, who was organized in the union of Christian miners , made it possible for him to attend an evangelical teachers' seminar . Meinberg, however, broke off his training and completed a commercial apprenticeship. He was said to have earned his living as a traveling salesman in images of saints before the war.

Meinberg became a member of the SPD , but was critical of its castle peace policy . He was drafted into military service at the beginning of the First World War , dismissed from the Eastern Front as unfit for war in autumn 1916 and then monitored by the military authorities. He found work at the colliery . In 1917 the SPD excluded Meinberg as an opposition party. Together with the Dorstfeld miners' elder Hermann Linke, he then built up the USPD in and around Dorstfeld. On September 9, 1917, the two founded the USPD's local branch in Dortmund. Meinberg, however, increasingly oriented himself towards the Spartacus League .

November Revolution

During the November Revolution , Meinberg became chairman of the Minden Workers 'and Soldiers' Council , but soon returned to Dortmund. He represented the left wing of the Dortmund USPD and converted to the KPD in February 1919 . He played a dominant role in founding the Dortmund KPD. When the general strike in the Ruhr area called in February 1919 failed , Meinberg went into hiding because counterrevolutionary Freikorp troops had started to occupy radical strongholds in the western Ruhr area. During the miners' strike in Dortmund and Witten at the end of March and the resulting general strike by miners in the Ruhr area at the beginning of April 1919, Meinberg then appeared again as a speaker at mass rallies by the strikers. On April 21, he was arrested and taken into protective custody. He escaped from the internment camp on June 1, but was arrested again on September 18, 1919 at a USPD meeting in Kiel .

Role in the Ruhr uprising in 1920

Chairman of the Dortmund Executive Committee

Meinberg was held in protective custody in the Dortmund court prison. When a rally against the Kapp Putsch was held on March 13, 1920 at Dortmund's Hansaplatz , which the USPD and SPD had jointly called for, a march to the court prison formed to demand Meinberg's release. Meinberg was actually released and carried on his shoulders to Hansaplatz, where he gave a speech against the coup and called for swift action. Like the USPD, Meinberg called for the formation of an action committee and the admission of revolutionary workers to the security forces , which the SPD rejected.

The historians Hellmut G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas point out that Meinberg was the most popular KPD leader in the Ruhr area at the time. He was both a “gorgeous speaker in mass meetings” and “an indefatigable agitator on a small scale”, who knew countless people, addressed workers on the streets and in bars and moved “like a fish in water” in the suburbs of Dortmund's workers. He is very much feared as a political opponent by SPD and trade union officials and, according to Erhard Lucas, “z. T. downright demonized ”. The Dortmund local group of the KPD had barely more than 40 members, was divided and, in Meinberg's own words, a “syndicalist, anti-authoritative, federalist homunculus”.

On March 15, the general strike began in Dortmund . A transport train with units of the Freikorps Lichtschlag , which had been dispatched by the General Command of the VII Army Corps in Munster and had passed Dortmund Central Station with a black-white-red flag and monarchist songs, caused a sensation. In Wetter there was fighting on the same day between armed workers' formations and the Freikorps units, which had apparently backed the Kapp - Lüttwitz government . Meanwhile, in front of a crowd on Hansaplatz, Meinberg demanded the arming of the proletariat , pointing out the danger of further troop transports . In front of the Dortmund town hall , there were subsequently armed clashes between demonstrators on the one hand and the police and security services on the other, in which a police officer and six demonstrators were killed. When, in this situation, the arrival of the main force of the Freikorps Lichtschlag was reported on the Dortmund Südbahnhof on March 16 , armed workers' troops moved from the surrounding areas to Dortmund and other workers armed themselves.

Members of the “Red Ruhr Army” in Dortmund

On the morning of March 17th, the workers attacked the volunteer corps, which was beaten and whose members were taken prisoner. The city of Dortmund was taken and Meinberg chaired the local executive committee. With that he acted as Commander-in-Chief or Lord Mayor of Dortmund. Meinberg demanded that March 17th be celebrated as “the day of the real revolution”. He initiated the election of workers' councils in the factories. The elected workers' councils elected a new executive council on March 29 and tried in vain to get the SPD, DDP and the center to cooperate.

On March 18, Meinberg declared that he would not think about the proclamation of a council republic in Dortmund and made it clear on March 25 that although he was in favor of the council organization, in his opinion only a unified German council republic could endure. In his speech on the occasion of the funeral of the workers killed in the struggle for the city on March 21, he offered to negotiate. The proclamation of the general strike in Dortmund on March 25th took place in his absence and against his will.

Attempts to negotiate and suppress the uprising

While the Reichswehr was already advancing to the Ruhr area, Meinberg decided at short notice on March 31 to take part in a conference with the Prussian Reich and State Commissioner for the Ruhr area and the newly appointed Prussian Interior Minister Carl Severing , which had been moved to Münster at short notice. In Hamm he was arrested by government troops and taken to Bad Hamm , where the Bavarian Rifle Brigade under Franz von Epp had taken quarters. Due to his popularity, Meinberg had become the enemy of the Reichswehr troops, who deliberately withheld food deliveries to Dortmund. Epp expressly refused Severing's order to release Meinberg to his superior, General Otto Haas . Instead, Meinberg was beaten several times, told he was sentenced to death, and asked several times to prepare to be shot. Only after the intervention of General Oskar von Watters , commander of military district VI in Münster, was Meinberg transferred to the prison there . Meinberg was brought from the prison to Severing's office in disguise. While the two were talking to each other, around 100 officers and soldiers demonstrating in front of the office demanded Meinberg's head. In the late night Meinberg was brought out of Munster by Severing's adjutants and returned to Dortmund on the afternoon of April 2nd.

In Dortmund, Meinberg declared the situation hopeless and asked the Red Guards to surrender their weapons. In order to be able to organize the disarmament, he tried to delay the advance of the troops by 24 hours by radio message to the Münster military district command . Later he had to defend himself against claims from SPD circles that he and other left-wing radical leaders had called the Reichswehr directly because they were no longer safe from their own people.

Meinberg fled before the Reichswehr invaded Dortmund. The Dortmund court martial issued an arrest warrant against him for high treason , riot and looting. On May 9, 1920, he was arrested at a secret state conference of the KPD in Nuremberg and imprisoned in the Werl central prison. In the course of the so-called " Kapp amnesty " he was released on August 4, 1920 and was again involved in political work.

Exclusion from the KPD

During the March 1921 action , Meinberg rejected the KPD's offensive slogans, but called for a general strike in a public speech. That's why he was accused of treason and high treason and to three years in prison convicted. The revision led to an acquittal, but Severing had Meinberg taken into protective custody. According to other sources, the sentence was commuted to fortress detention in late 1921 . After the murder of Walther Rathenau , Meinberg was amnestied or released in July 1922.

Unlike in 1920, Meinberg could not take over the chairmanship of the Dortmund local branch of the KPD this time. He became editor of the Westfälische Arbeiter-Zeitung , which belonged to the KPD newspaper Ruhr-Echo . As a supporter of the KPD headquarters under Ernst Meyer , which pursued the policy of the “ united front ”, he clashed with supporters of the Fischer - Maslow faction in Dortmund . Meinberg was expelled from the KPD on December 17, 1922, on the pretext that he had embezzled party funds. The fact that he declared the Bielefeld Agreement to be a “product of the emergency” during the Ruhr uprising, as a violation of the party line, may also have contributed to his exclusion. Although he kept in contact with former comrades and worked with the rest of the USPD and later the KPD opposition Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer as well as socialist and communist youth organizations, but without joining an organization. He earned his living for himself and his family during this time as an employee of the dairy farm and with an agency and commission business. From 1927 he called himself a writer and worked as a freelancer for the left-wing General-Anzeiger for Dortmund . In 1927 he wrote a series of articles for the Essen-Dortmund KPD-Blatt in which he critically dealt with Severing's memories of 1919/20 in the Wetter- und Watterwinkel .

National Socialism and the Post-War Period

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " of the General-Anzeiger was brought into line . Meinberg was imprisoned in Dortmund and Bochum from April to the end of 1933 . Until August 1935 he made his way as a woodworker for the city and then until 1942 with the distribution of craft literature. In between there were periods of unemployment. Apparently he did not join political resistance circles. In 1940 he was briefly arrested. In 1943 he became a payroll clerk in a company controlled by the Gestapo . Because of extreme nearsightedness , he escaped military service, but was used to clear rubble. In May 1944 he was arrested for undermining military strength . When his apartment was bombed out soon afterwards, he took advantage of a short-term release and went to Kohlstädt near Paderborn with his wife and daughter .

After the end of the war, Meinberg worked, among other things, in the Reich Association of Bomb Victims . He was one of the founders of the European Union , which he quickly left. Most recently he wrote articles and essays.

Publications

  • On the gallows. A miners play from the political life of our time. Oesterhold, Berlin 1931.
  • Uprising on the Ruhr. Speeches and essays . ed. by Hellmut G. Haasis u. Erhard Lucas. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt am Main, undated [1973].

literature

  • George Eliasberg : The War of the Ruhr in 1920. Verl. Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1974, ISBN 3-87831-148-6 .
  • Hellmut G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. Speeches and essays. ed. by Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-060-X , pp. 7-22.
  • Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920.
    • Vol. 1: From the general strike against the military coup to the armed workers' uprising. 2nd Edition. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1974, ISBN 3-87877-075-8 .
    • Vol. 2: The armed workers' uprising in the Ruhr area in its internal structure and in its relationship to the class struggles in the various regions of the Reich. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-064-2 .
    • Vol. 3: Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. Speeches and essays. Edited by Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-060-X , p. 7 f.
  2. ↑ Carl Severing writes in his memoirs in 1919/20 in Wetter- und Watterwinkel (1927): “I was told that before the war he traded in images of saints. From saints and believers he had, if not something else, in any case the pathetic language and the urgency of the lecture ”. Quoted from Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. Speeches and essays. Edited by Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-060-X , p. 18. Haasis and Lucas point out the defamatory nature of Severing's presentation. Ibid. P. 19. The trade in images of saints is taken up by Günther Högl: The 20th Century. Urbanity and Democracy. In: Gustav Luntowski (ed.). History of the city of Dortmund. Harenberg Verlag, Dortmund 1994, ISBN 978-3-611-00397-4 , p. 361.
  3. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. Speeches and essays. Edited by Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-060-X , p. 8.
  4. ^ A b Günther Högl: The 20th Century. Urbanity and Democracy. In: Gustav Luntowski (ed.): History of the city of Dortmund. Harenberg Verlag, Dortmund 1994, ISBN 978-3-611-00397-4 , p. 361.
  5. ↑ a b Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 8f.
  6. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 9.
  7. ↑ George Eliasberg: Der Ruhrkrieg von 1920. Verl. Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1974, ISBN 3-87831-148-6 , p. 85.
  8. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 10. Cf. also George Eliasberg: Der Ruhrkrieg von 1920. Verl. Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1974, ISBN 3-87831-148-6 , p. 85.
  9. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 1. From the general strike against the military coup to the armed workers' uprising. 2nd Edition. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1974, ISBN 3-87877-075-8 , p. 183.
  10. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 1. From the general strike against the military coup to the armed workers' uprising. 2nd Edition. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1974, ISBN 3-87877-075-8 , pp. 186-189.
  11. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 10; Günther Högl: The 20th Century. Urbanity and Democracy. In: Gustav Luntowski (ed.). History of the city of Dortmund. Harenberg Verlag, Dortmund 1994, ISBN 978-3-611-00397-4 , p. 375.
  12. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 2. The armed workers' uprising in the Ruhr area in its internal structure and in its relationship to the class struggles in the various regions of the empire. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-064-2 , p. 44f .; Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Attempts at negotiations and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 13.
  13. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , pp. 25f.
  14. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 35. The speech is printed according to the report of the Dortmund General-Anzeiger in: Adolf Meinberg: Aufstand an der Ruhr. Speeches and essays. Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-87877-060-X , pp. 141-146, esp. 143-146.
  15. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , pp. 104f.
  16. ↑ a b Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Attempts at negotiations and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , pp. 240f.
  17. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 10f.
  18. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 249 f .; Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 19 f.
  19. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 311f.
  20. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , pp. 440, 442.
  21. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 384.
  22. ↑ Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. , P. 12f.
  23. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 457.
  24. ↑ a b Hellmuth G. Haasis and Erhard Lucas: Introduction. In: Adolf Meinberg: Uprising on the Ruhr. P. 13f.
  25. ↑ Erhard Lucas: March Revolution 1920. Vol. 3. Negotiation attempts and their failure; Counter-strategies of government and military; the defeat of the insurrectionary movement; the white terror. Verl. Roter Stern, Frankfurt (am Main) 1978, ISBN 3-87877-085-5 , p. 446.
personal data
SURNAME Meinberg, Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German workers leader and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Wickede
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1955
Place of death Kohlstädt