Adolph Kummeruss

Adolph Ludwig K Bäumenuss (born June 23, 1895 in Hamburg ; † August 7, 1979 in Travemünde ) was a leading German trade unionist (chairman of the ÖTV and the DGB ).

Life during the German Empire and the First World War

Kummeruss was born in Hamburg as the son of a blacksmith. He had eleven other siblings. As "bread boys", Adolph and his twin brother Georg contributed to the family support. He attended elementary school, then left his parents' house and slept in the neighborhood. In 1909 he joined the Socialist Youth Workers . From 1912 he earned his living as a showman in the port of Hamburg . In the same year he joined the German Transport Workers Association and the SPD . On May 20, 1915 he was drafted as an infantryman for military service. His division fought on the Eastern Front in Russia and suffered heavy losses. He himself was badly wounded and transferred to the Western Front in March 1916. In October 1918 he was wounded again. Kummeruss became a staunch pacifist during the First World War .

Activity during the Weimar Republic

After the end of the war he became a street sweeper in Hamburg-Eilbek and a short time later he was again a showman at the Hamburg Salpeterkai, as well as a cotton twill . His advanced training at the Hamburg Adult Education Center also took place during this period. In the spring of 1920 he was elected union shop steward and in the same year - after the Reich Works Council Act had been passed - he was elected to the works council in the Port of Hamburg. There he worked as a foreman from 1923 to 1926. In the SPD, he appeared as a speaker at the district level and other party events. His union career began as an elected “door controller”. In 1923, the district executive elected Adolph K Bäumenuss as assessor on the Hamburg executive board. Re-elections to the district executive took place until 1933. From 1924 to 1933 he was a member of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold . From October 1, 1926 to June 30, 1927, he was delegated by the main board to study at the Academy of Labor in Frankfurt am Main . There he attended evening lectures by the labor lawyer Hugo Sinzheimer , which had a lasting impact on his legal concept. After his return from Frankfurt he was employed as a full-time functionary. As the "agitation leader" for the Port of Hamburg, he had to solve all the union problems of the port workers. At the same time he worked as a permanent employee at the Hamburger Echo . In the final phase of the Weimar Republic he was transferred to the Hamburg “legal information office” of the general association, where he stayed until the unions were brought into line on May 2, 1933.

time of the nationalsocialism

Kummeruss could not come to terms with the smashing of the unions. He agitated against National Socialism and already in May 1933 visited Edo Fimmen , the executive secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation , in order to make initial agreements about illegal actions. The organizational area of ​​Kummeruss for the work in the resistance stretched from Hamburg to the Danish border and from Mecklenburg to Berlin . The Gestapo managed a devastating blow against the entire resistance group through a spy . All members were arrested. Kummeruss was arrested on June 15, 1935 and defied the interrogations and abuse at Gestapo headquarters . He did not reveal any names. After several months of solitary confinement in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp , he was transferred to Berlin in the summer of 1936 and smuggled through various prisons at short intervals (Stargard, Hanover, Münster, Hamm, Lingen, Stettin). On September 2, 1936, the trial began in a special court in Szczecin . Because of the scant evidence on the indictment as ringleader, he was sentenced to two years in prison, which he served in Neusustrum . After his release, he remained under police supervision and was declared "unworthy of defense" by the authorities. From 1939 to September 30, 1945, Kummeruss worked as a manager at Nadge & Neffen (veneer factory), which was completely bombed out in 1943.

post war period

After the end of the Second World War , the former showman immediately made himself available to the “General Association of Transport and Community Workers”, which was being established. He belonged to the inner circle of Weimar functionaries who met on June 21, 1945 and prepared the application for approval of the general association with the military authorities. From October 1, 1945 he was employed full-time by the Hamburg “Gesamtverband”. Together with other "seasoned trade unionists", Kummeruss fought the socialist-dominated unified union Socialist Free Trade Union (SFG) and stood behind the establishment of social democratic unions, which should be organized according to the industrial association principle. From June 1945 he was a member of the provisional administrative committee of the Hamburg trade unions. In January 1946 he was appointed its chairman.

Overall, the early start of the trade union movement in the British zone and the central role of the trade union stronghold Hamburg gave him a significant influence on the future policy of his association. In Hamburg he advocated the strict course of an industrial union independent of all political parties and the integration of workers, civil servants and employees in an organization. On May 20, 1946, the board of the "Working Group on Transport and Public Service" was constituted, in which the Hamburg citizen was elected deputy chairman (1st chairman: Hans Jahn, secretary: Heinrich Malina). At a meeting on August 13, 1946 in Stockholm, the Executive Council of the ITF approved the working group's application to join the "International Transport Workers Federation". The ITF was the first international trade secretariat to accept German unions after the war. In recognition of the upright trade unionist, he was elected to the General Council of the International Federation of Public Service Personnel Unions (PSI) on January 30, 1948, and to the General Council of the ITF on July 24, 1948. Kummeruss was one of the union leaders in the reconstruction: He held important honorary posts in Hamburg in the SPD and the unions, which documented the typical Hamburg interdependence of the Free Hanseatic City and the organized labor movement: On March 30, 1946 he was appointed as an assessor at the Higher Administrative Court; since January he was a member of the constitutional committee of the Hamburg citizenship; on April 2, 1947 he became a deputy of the Department of Economics and Transport. He was one of six union representatives who met the employers for the first meeting on November 19, 1946. As one of four trade unionists, from 1946 onwards he sat on the commission that steered the reconstruction of the Hamburg trade union building and from February 1946 on he was one of the managing directors of the "Verlag Freier Unions GmbH", which began to publish business reports for the first time in 1947. Since June 1947 he was a member of the supervisory board of the “non-profit high-sea fishing company” in Cuxhaven .

In 1947, as chairman of the DGB, he led the central “rally against hunger”. As a sharp opponent of the dismantling, Kummeruss sought contact with the leading men of the Allied occupation powers in order to point out the "absurdities of the explosions". At the constituent meeting of the German Federation of Trade Unions (British Zone) he was elected to the committee in Bielefeld from April 22 to 25, 1947. Kummeruss opened the Association Day of the Public Services, Transport and Traffic Unions of the British Zone from 9 to 12 September 1947 in Krefeld.

In the period from February to October 1946 he was a member of the Hamburg citizenship appointed by the British occupying power . During this time he belonged to the trade union faction. For the SPD he was then an elected member of the citizenship from October 1946 to October 1949 .

Chairman of the ÖTV and the DGB

As one of the “presidencies” he was proposed by the mandate review commission as 1st chairman of the ÖTV union at the Association Day of the Public Service Unions, Transport and Traffic in Stuttgart from January 28th to 30th, 1949 and one of the two chairmen “with the same Rights ”(against 14 delegate votes). With the tasks of representing the organization to the federal government, the occupation authorities, the DGB and the coordination of the main departments with each other, however, Kummeruss held the classic departments of the "first man". In addition to his work for the ÖTV trade union, Kummeruss was involved in all the decisive meetings in the establishment of a trade union federation in the new Germany. At the founding congress of the German Federation of Trade Unions for the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, he was elected to the board in October 1949. He was unanimously re-elected chairman at the 2nd trade union congress from May 3rd to 7th, 1955 in Frankfurt am Main and the 3rd congress from June 1st to 6th, 1958 in Munich.

He also held central positions within the DGB. He was a member of the board of trustees of the Economic Institute of the Trade Unions (WWI) and the advisory board of the union's own publishing house. Within the DGB, the ÖTV chairman campaigned for an organizational reform with the aim of giving the DGB leadership significantly more competence. As an “international secretary”, Kammernuss played a central role in the two large trade secretariats.

Role in public

Kummeruss was one of the union chairmen who set dissonant tones in the early phase of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1951 he sharply scourged “anti-democratic phenomena” in the Federal Republic. He was particularly concerned about the development of soldiers' unions. The former Nazi prisoner sharply and unequivocally criticized the influence of former SS men and high-ranking generals of the Nazi regime on the politics of the federal government. He categorically rejected German rearmament. In the fall of 1951 he shocked the federal government with radical calls for participation in the public service. Kummeruss assigned the trade unions the role of making up for the parliament's loss of function through democratic controls. He did not skip polemical conflicts with any leading politician in Bonn. In terms of socio- political issues, Kammernuss agreed to Viktor Agartz's "expansive wage theory" , which he advocated with edgy demands in terms of media policy. Domestically, the fight against the planned emergency laws was one of the priorities of his last term of office. But he also set other accents. He campaigned for a consistent education policy and warned of the possible dangers of uncontrolled rationalization. In terms of collective bargaining policy, he urged short contract terms so as not to disconnect employees from economic developments.

Retirement and final years of life

On the 5th trade union day from June 28 to July 4, 1964 in Dortmund, Kammernus retired - highly honored by all sides. He spent his old age in Lübeck. In the Hanseatic tradition, he had always rejected state medals and awards.

In July 1960 the ITF awarded him the ITF Badge of Honor at the congress in Bern in recognition of his services. On January 30, 1963, the "International Union de la Resistance et la Déportation" awarded him the "Diplome d'Honeur de la Resistance", which was later presented to him in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, the ÖTV youth school in St. Andreasberg in the Harz region was renamed Adolph-K Bäumenuss-Haus. The ver.di education center Undeloh was named after him. Since 1971 he has been a member of the SPD senior citizens' council , against whose conversion into a new “working group for older citizens” he vehemently resisted.

Adolph K Bäumenuss died on August 7, 1979 in Travemünde. The burial took place at sea among the closest family and friends.

literature

• Rüdiger Zimmermann : 100 years of ÖTV. The history of a trade union and its predecessor organizations, 1896–1996. Vol. 2: Biographies. Edited by the ÖTV trade union. Union-Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-922454-44-5 , pp. 128-132.

Web links

• Rüdiger Zimmermann: Biographical lexicon of the ÖTV and its predecessor organizations. Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bonn 1998.
• social democratic resistance and persecution: Adolph K Bäumenuss
• Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung: Adolph K Bäumenuss