Cornelius Gellert

Cornelius Gellert

Cornelius Gellert (born July 17, 1881 in Kassel ; † December 30, 1944 there ) was a German politician .

Political activity

Gellert had been an SPD member in Kassel from 1906 and from 1908 to 1919 a member of the SPD party executive and a member of the Social Democratic Education Committee. In 1918 the Kassel workers appointed him as city commandant; until 1919 he was city councilor for the SPD in Kassel. He was an early member of the Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association (ATSB) and from 1906 to 1919 district representative (chairman) of the district of Kurhessen-Südhannover (13th district).

In December 1918, Gellert was asked by the Kassel Workers 'and Soldiers' Council to take over one of the two commanding posts of the Kassel City Army . The city armed forces had been set up since January 1, 1919 to maintain public safety and order and existed until 1920. In the elections to the board of the 12th Bundestag in Leipzig at Easter 1919, Gellert was elected chairman of the ATSB. He held this office until 1933. The election made him move from Kassel to Leipzig . From 1925 to 1933 he was also chairman of the LSI / SASI. He was also a member of the Reich Advisory Board for Physical Education in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and city councilor in Leipzig; he was also a member of the supervisory board of the ATSB stock corporation.

For the SPD he was a member of the Reichstag from September 1930 to July 1932 and from November 1932 to March 1933 (each for constituency 29 Leipzig).

Nazi era

After the occupation of the federal school on March 23, 1933, he was dismissed as chairman of the ATSB and was unemployed.

In July 1933 he returned to Kassel, where he was politically monitored (he was subject to police reporting) and was arrested several times at short notice. The NS factory cell organization let Gellert no longer work as a carpenter, so he remained unemployed for years.

On September 1, 1939, as part of the special war campaign, the preventive arrest and placement in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg (prisoner No. 2494) until November 1940 (15 months) took place. After interventions by his son, who served as a soldier in the Wehrmacht and died a little later, he was released as a man with severe health problems, but continued to be monitored by the police.

On the night of December 30th to 31st, 1944, Gellert died of a heart attack in an air raid on Kassel. He was buried in Martinhagen near Kassel.

Familiar

Gellert's sister Minna Bernst (1880-1965), a seamstress by profession, was elected in March 1919 as one of the first six women to the 72-member city ​​council of Kassel and in 1920 was one of the founders of the workers' welfare in Kassel.

literature

• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Cornelius Gellert in the catalog of the German National Library
• Cornelius Gellert in the database of members of the Reichstag