Adolf Scholz (politician)

Gustav Adolf Scholz (born January 13, 1890 in Eibau ; † June 22, 1980 in Herrnhut ) was a German politician ( SPD , USPD , KPD , SED ).

Life

Scholz was the son of a carpenter. He attended elementary school , did an apprenticeship as a wood sculptor and then went on a hike. From 1910 he did military service in Metz. From 1912 he worked in a piano factory in Löbau and later moved to Lemgo . From 1914 to 1918 he did military service in the First World War . He was wounded and then served as an armored soldier . At the end of 1918 he returned to Lemgo.

politics

In 1908 he joined the SPD. In early 1919 he was co-founder and 1st chairman of the USPD in Lemgo. From May 1919 he was chairman of the USPD in the Free State of Lippe . In December 1920 he was a delegate to the unification congress with the VKPD in Berlin. After the unification, Scholz was state chairman of the KPD in Lippe-Detmold until 1933. From 1921 to 1925 he was a member of the central committee of the KPD. He was also a member of the extended Ruhr district management. On July 4, 1922, he became known as an iconoclast . As a result of a demonstration, the town hall and other public buildings were occupied under his leadership and the pictures of the Lippe counts and princes as well as von Hindenburg hung there and thrown on the street.

From 1922, Scholz was the leader of the Proletarian Hundreds , the paramilitary units of the KPD, in the Free State of Lippe. The organization, which was officially known locally as the “hiking club” or “sports and hiking club”, comprised between 150 and 250 armed men in the Free State of Lippe. Even after the ban in October 1922 by the Lippe state government, the troops continued to exist. On October 23, 1923, Scholz led a troop of 140 KPD members to an illegal arsenal of the Reichswehr in Hagen near Lage. The communists transport 125 boxes of weapons and explosives. On December 21, 1923, some of the explosives were used to carry out an attack on the Upper Presidium in Hanover (Upper President was Noske). The criminal proceedings against Scholz and the other parties involved were discontinued at the instigation of the Foreign Office: The Reichswehr camp contradicted the provisions of the peace treaty and the Foreign Ministry feared foreign policy conflicts if the case became known.

From 1921 until the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was a member of the Landtag of the Free State of Lippe . He was the only member of the KPD until the KPD received two seats for the first time in the state elections in Lippe in 1933 . At the municipal level he was a city councilor in Lemgo. Scholz wrote regularly for the newspaper of the Bielefelder KPD, the Westphalian-Lippische Arbeiterzeitung . In the opinion of the Prussian Ministry of Justice, the article he wrote in 1926, “Attention, dogs!” Constituted the criminal offense of insulting. However, the state parliament refused to lift Scholz's immunity and thus prevented criminal prosecution.

After the seizure of power, the leading politicians of the KPD in Lippe were arrested on May 1, 1933. Scholz managed to go into hiding and lived under the names Hans Schmidt and Leo Clemens in Essen, where he helped set up the illegal KPD organization. He was arrested on December 6, 1933. On December 7, 1934, the OLG Hamm sentenced him to two years and nine months in prison . Even after this time he was held in protective custody in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1938 . Scholz then returned to Eibau and worked there as a carpenter. From April 1944 to April 1945 he was again imprisoned in a concentration camp.

In June 1945 he returned to Eibau. There he again worked for the KPD and became a member of the SED when the SPD and KPD were forced to merge into the SED. Until August 1947 he was the first chairman of the SED district association in Löbau. Later he was chairman of the Löbau district council.

In 1976 Scholz was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.

literature

• Jürgen Hartmann: On the history of the KPD and the communist resistance in Lippe; in: Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde, 1993, pp. 199 ff., digitized .

Web links

• Biography at the Federal Foundation for Work-Up