Albert Walter
Albert Paul Gustav Walter (born September 22, 1885 in Flatow , † February 14, 1980 in Hamburg ) was a German politician of the USPD , the KPD and the DP and a trade unionist .
Life
The son of a coachman lost his father at an early age and grew up on his grandfather's farm in Neumark . After graduating from elementary school , Walter was hired as a bargee in 1899 , moved to Hamburg in 1902 and went to sea on HAPAG ships . Walter did his military service from 1905 to 1907 in the Imperial Navy , after which he worked as quartermaster on HAPAG ships.
At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Walter was in the United States , where he was interned when they entered the war in 1917 ; The interned German seamen elected him spokesman for the Committee of Interned Seamen , in which capacity he directed the return of seamen to Germany in the summer of 1919.
Returning to Hamburg, Walter joined the USPD and in January 1920 was elected chairman of the syndicalist German Seamen's Association (DSB). He held this position until its dissolution in 1925. According to the Soviet GPU defector Richard JH Krebs (alias Jan Valtin ) Walter von Lenin himself had previously been appointed Political Commissar of the (Soviet) Baltic Fleet shortly after the end of the First World War.
In 1921, in the course of the process of disintegration of the USPD, he converted to the KPD and in 1922 led the union , which had since been renamed the Deutscher Schiffahrtsbund , to the Red Union International (RGI). On behalf of RGI chairman Salomon Losowski , he began to organize international port offices that served to spread communist propaganda among seafarers. In their heyday, the port offices supported 72 newspapers and organized more than 4,000 operating cells worldwide.
In 1924 he was elected to the Hamburg parliament for the KPD , to which he belonged until 1933, at times he was also a member of the district leadership of his party and from 1928 General Secretary of the International of Seafarers and Dock Workers . The revolutionary activities of the ISH within the framework of the Comintern included a. preparing a world strike in the event of war against the Soviet Union and supporting Soviet espionage.
In March 1933 Walter was arrested after the " seizure of power " by the NSDAP and the fire in the Reichstag and was held in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp for a year . Unemployed until 1938, he then worked as an acquisition agent , publicist and translator (including for the German Fichtebund ). During this time, Walter underwent an ideological change towards National Socialism .
After the war began in 1939, he wrote the brochure The English War and the German Workers , in which he blamed Great Britain for the outbreak of World War II and described Adolf Hitler as the leader of the German workers. This brochure was published in an edition of 120,000 copies, was translated into various languages and distributed by the NSDAP.
After the end of the war, this brochure was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone together with Walter's Der Englischer Arbeiter und seine Führer (1941, also all foreign-language editions) .
After the war ended in 1945 he initially wanted to withdraw from politics, but in 1948 he joined the conservative German Party (DP), for which he was a member of the German Bundestag from 1949 to 1957 (since 1953 a member of the Hamburg V constituency ). In 1953 he was elected as the successor to the radical national Rudi Conventz as state chairman of the DP in Hamburg. With the merger of the DP with the displaced party GB / BHE , he became a member of the merged All-German Party , for which he was also a candidate in the 1961 Bundestag election in the Hamburg V constituency.
Fonts
- The English War and the German Workers. A reminder call . 61 pages, Hansischer Gildenverlag, Hamburg 1940.
- The English worker and his leaders . Büttner, Berlin 1941.
literature
- Walter, Albert Paul . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
- Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 2: N-Z. Attachment. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , pp. 918-919.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1947-nslit-w.html
- ↑ Walter, Albert . In: Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdB - The People's Representation 1946–1972. - [Waas bis Wynands] (= KGParl online publications ). Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties e. V., Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020703-7 , pp. 1320 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2014070812574 ( kgparl.de [PDF; 140 kB ; accessed on June 19, 2017]).
- ↑ Full text The English War and the German Workers. A reminder call
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Walter, Albert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Walter, Albert Paul |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German politicians (USPD, KPD, DP), MdHB, MdB and trade unionists |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 22, 1885 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Flatow |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 14, 1980 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |