Eduard Wald

Eduard (Edu) Wald (born March 10, 1905 in Kiel , † November 5, 1978 in Lachen am Ammersee ) was a communist politician, trade unionist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Eduard Wald attended a middle and high school in Kiel and obtained the upper secondary qualification , after which he completed an apprenticeship as a gardener from 1921 to 1923 and passed an assistant examination. In 1923 he was a member of the Communist Youth Association . In 1924 he joined the KPD and early became a member of the Lower Saxony district leadership , where he was responsible for agitation and propaganda and the Red Front Fighters League , and in 1926 he became editor of the Lower Saxony workers' newspaper , for which he received twelve criminal records between 1926 and 1929 and from 1926 for press violations District treasurer until 1927. In 1929 he briefly completed a cure in the Soviet Union because of a lung disease and was then briefly active in the educational work of the KPD. As a member of the tendency of the Compromisers , which was critical of the ultra-left politics of the party leadership around Ernst Thälmann , he lost his position with the party in 1929 (although this was not excluded despite party proceedings) and was temporarily unemployed, then from 1930 to 1933 as a factory worker. From 1930, Wald began to build up a network of compromisers inside and outside the KPD on a supraregional level .

After the NSDAP came to power , Wald had to go into hiding in May 1933. He succeeded in building up the resistance group, the Committee for Proletarian Unity , which had several hundred members and whose main field of activity was in Hanover . He maintained close contacts with another “Compromisers” group around Hans Westermann in Hamburg and the Hanoverian SAPD group around Otto Brenner . From 1934, Wald was based in Berlin , where he endeavored to coordinate various Compromiser groups throughout the Reich. Arrested by the Gestapo on May 11, 1936 , Wald was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the People's Court on June 30, 1937 , which he served in the Emsland camps and in the Brandenburg penitentiary until he was liberated in April 1945 .

In 1945, Wald took over functions in the Lower Saxony KPD again. From August 23, 1946 to October 29, 1946, he was a member of the appointed Landtag of the State of Hanover and was a license holder of the Lower Saxony People's Newspaper until he left in 1948 because of criticism of the party's Stalinist policy . From 1948 Wald worked as a full-time functionary of the DGB in Lower Saxony and at federal level, from 1950 he published the information service enemies of democracy and in the same year he joined the SPD .

In his second marriage, he was married to Orli Reichert-Wald, who had survived Auschwitz, from 1947 .

Works

• The trade unions in current political events . Frankfurt am Main 1953

literature

• Wilhelm Sommer: Edu Wald and the resistance group “Committee for Proletarian Unity” in Hanover - with a text by Peter Wald. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter (New Series), Vol. 57/58, 2003/2004. Hannover 2004, pp. 205-218.
• Barbara Simon : Member of Parliament in Lower Saxony 1946–1994. Biographical manual. Edited by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Lower Saxony State Parliament, Hanover 1996, p. 393.
• Wald, Eduard (Edu) . 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 .

Web links

• Eduard Wald in the archive of social democracy