August Ziehl

August Ziehl (born March 1, 1881 in Geesthacht ; † May 17, 1965 there ) was a German politician.

Life

The son of a Geesthacht basket maker and SPD functionary took up his father's profession after attending primary school and at the age of fifteen he joined the local SPD, where he soon assumed a leading role. After participating in the war for the first time , he joined the newly founded USPD in 1917 with the large majority of the local SPD association . After he was drafted again in September 1918, Ziehl deserted and was sentenced to imprisonment, from which the November Revolution freed him. Ziehl represented the local USPD at the 1919 party congress in Berlin and joined the VKPD with almost the entire local group in 1921 . Sentenced to two years in prison for participating in the March 1921 campaign , Ziehl was given an amnesty after 14 months.

In 1924 he was elected to the Hamburg parliament on the list of the KPD (Geesthacht belonged to Hamburg until 1937), to which he belonged until 1931. From 1924 to 1933 he also acted as city councilor in Geesthacht, and in 1931 briefly as deputy mayor of the small town, which was then derisively dubbed Little Moscow . As an opponent of the Stalinization policy of the party leadership around Ernst Thälmann , Ziehl left the KPD with 200 of 320 members and joined the KPD-O around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer . Belonging to the minority around Paul Frölich and Jacob Walcher , Ziehl - again with almost the entire local group - joined the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD) in 1932 .

In 1933, after the National Socialists " seized power " , Ziehl was imprisoned in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp for almost a year until 1934 , and again in Neuengamme for 13 months from 1944 . Soon after the end of the war, Ziehl was re-admitted to the KPD, from which he was excluded again in 1949 with the majority of the local group for criticizing Stalinism. In 1951, Ziehl co-founded the short-lived “ Titoist ” Independent Workers' Party of Germany (UAPD), which still received over 3% of the votes in local elections in Geesthacht in the same year. After the UAPD was soon dissolved, Ziehl continued the Geesthacht local group for a few years under the name of the Socialist Workers' Party . In 1961, four years before his death, Ziehl joined the German Peace Union (DFU).

Fonts

• Geesthacht - 60 years of the labor movement 1890-1950. Geesthacht 1958.

literature

• Ziehl, August Johann . 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 .