Alfred Schmidt (politician, 1891)

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Alfred Schmidt (born November 24, 1891 in Wintersdorf , † October 9, 1985 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a communist politician and trade unionist.

Life

Alfred Schmidt was one of twelve children of a shoemaker. At the age of 17 he joined the trade union, followed a year later by joining the SPD . He could not learn a trade because his family could not afford the tuition. So he was initially an unskilled worker in a brewery, then a railroad shunter. He was a soldier from 1912 to 1918, including four years at the front. He joined the Spartakusbund and became a member of the USPD in 1917 . In 1919 he joined the railway workers' union and the KPD . He spent two and a half years in prison for his illegal party work after the KPD was banned. From 1924 to 1928 he was a member of the state parliament in Thuringia, chairman of the KPD inErfurt , member of the sub-district management and city councilor.

In 1928 he was elected to the Prussian state parliament for the KPD . Schmidt opposed the KPD's new ultra-left policy. He fought the RGO policy and was committed to the united front of communists and social democrats against National Socialism. In December 1928 he was expelled from the KPD. He then joined the Communist Party opposition , in which he became a member of the district and Reich leadership. Despite his exclusion from the KPD, he retained his mandate until the new state parliament was elected in 1932.

After the National Socialists seized power on January 30, 1933, Alfred Schmidt headed the illegal work in the Erfurt subdistrict. He was first arrested in 1934 and spent two months in prison. From August 1935 to May 1939 he was again imprisoned in the concentration camps Esterwegen (in the north German moor) and Sachsenhausen . Schmidt later got in touch again with Otto Engert and his group and in 1943/44 he organized a resistance group with Georg Schumann, among others, in Leipzig, whose platform he wrote together with his fellow KPOs. They were "old" communists and rejected the new course of the KPD, which (reoriented) aimed for a popular front with the democratic sections of the German bourgeoisie. After interning in the concentration camp, Schmidt earned his living as a coal carrier and construction worker.

In 1945 he was one of those who wanted to build socialism from the very beginning. Schmidt became a member of the KPD again and after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD in 1946 a member of the SED . On November 1, 1945 he was elected country manager of the food-pleasure-restaurants union . However, the first repression measures soon followed against former members of the KPD-O, who were also referred to as " Brandlerists ". Because of his open criticism of the methods of the Soviet occupation, Alfred Schmidt was deposed on August 31, 1947, expelled from the SED and arrested by the Soviet military police on July 6, 1948. The work of the party control bodies led to Schmidt being sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal on December 2, 1948, "for anti-Soviet propaganda". This death sentence was then "mitigated" to 25 years in a labor camp. Schmidt first served his sentence in the SMT penal institution in the Bautzen penal institution and was then taken to the Soviet Union.

Alfred Schmidt had hoped in 1945/46 that the leadership of the SED would have learned from the mistakes of the KPD from the time before 1933 and would build a socialist Germany with the working people, which the Soviet Union would then in "proletarian solidarity" during the reconstruction after the destruction of the German -Soviet War could help. He assumed that this would only be possible if the factories were not dismantled and the working people had enough to eat. These ideas contradicted Stalin's policy of occupation .

After more than eight years in prison, he was released to the Federal Republic of Germany on July 25, 1956 , as a result of the Khrushchev thaw . There Schmidt met his wife again, who had left the GDR in 1954. He found work in the Salzgitter works and began to work politically in the workers' policy group again.

In Bautzen he had difficulties with anti-communist inmates because he confessed to being a communist while in prison. Therefore, after he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, he was denounced by a former inmate, saying that Schmidt was perfectly capable of working for the GDR state security and the KGB . He was interrogated several times about this, but the case against him was dropped by the Attorney General on January 19, 1959. Schmidt remained a communist. He spent his last years in a senior citizens 'home run by the workers' welfare in Frankfurt am Main.

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personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist and trade unionist
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Wintersdorf , Thuringia
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1985
Place of death Frankfurt am Main