August Kunze

August Kunze (born October 1, 1892 in Hanover ; † February 21, 1959 in Erfurt ) was a German trade union official , member of the state parliament (SED) and chief director of the state-owned companies in Thuringia .

Life

Kunze graduated after attending the elementary school , a vocational training at the Deutsche Reichsbahn , which him to the civil service took over. In 1919 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the following years he worked as a union secretary of the Reichsgewerkschaft Deutscher Eisenbahnbeamten (Reich Union of German Railway Officials) and candidate for the province and city of Hanover . From 1921 to 1924 he took over functions on the board of the Reichsgewerkschaft. From 1923 Kunze lived in Berlin and became a member of the executive board of the General German Civil Service Association (ADB). From 1925 onwards, Kunze was a member of the main board of the Union of Railway Workers in Germany (EdED).

After the onset of National Socialism, Kunze worked as managing director from July 1933 to December 1939 in a publishing house (Aku-Verlag), which, according to his own statement, had originally been founded to camouflage trade union resistance activities against the Nazi regime. Kunze took part in illegal activities, among others together with Lorenz Breunig , Willi Besener and Hermann Brill . However, he himself was largely spared from reprisals by the Nazi regime.

After the National Socialist regime was eliminated in 1945, Kunze joined the Association of Democratic Socialists (BDS) and the newly founded SPD. He was actively involved in the reconstruction of the union and was state chairman of the railway industrial union in Thuringia in 1945/46 . From September 1946 to the beginning of 1947 he was department head / state secretary of the "Social Policy Department" in the FDGB of Thuringia. Since the forced unification of the SPD and KPD in 1946 , he belonged to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and with her mandate became a member of the state parliament. He was considered an economic and financial expert of his party and represented the SED in the council of elders of the state parliament. As a member of the Landtag of Thuringia, to which he belonged from 1947 to 1950, he drew attention to himself several times through his independence in political judgment and his stamina, for example when he protested against violations of the budgetary law of the Landtag because of the state government and Soviet military administration of Thuringia (SMAD ) had already made binding agreements before the budget debate.

From 1947 to 1948 Kunze was the chief director of the main administration of state-owned companies, which were converted into public property by SMAD orders . Later he was head of department for economic planning at the prime minister for some time . In 1949 Kunze narrowly escaped a party exclusion procedure, but was transferred to a less important post at the Chamber of Technology (KdT). From 1952 Kunze held a leading position at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the Erfurt district.

literature

• Steffen Kachel : A red-red special path? Social Democrats and Communists in Thuringia 1919 to 1949 . Publications of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, Small Series Volume 29, p. 558.
• Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz : Railway trade unionists in the Nazi state. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration (1933–1945) . Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-353-1 , pp. 346, 354, 559 f. (Short biography).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jochen Lengemann . Thuringian state parliaments 1919-1952. Boehlau Verlag 2014 ISBN 9783412221799