Eugene De Witte

Eugen Rudolf De Witte (born October 8, 1882 in Karlsbad , † September 19, 1952 in London ) was a Czechoslovak politician ( DSAP ).

Life and activity

He was the son of Carlsbad photographer Carl de Witte and was born out of wedlock and baptized a Roman Catholic on October 19, 1882 in the Dean's Church.

De Witte was a photographer and draftsman by profession . During his traveling years he stayed in Russia , Austria-Hungary and the German Empire . He was active in the social democratic movement from an early age . In 1898 he joined the SPD . He was expelled from Imperial Germany for political activity .

From 1906 De Witte was a functionary of the SDAP and from 1919 the DSAP. In 1907 he joined the editorial team of the social democratic daily Volkswille in Karlsbad , where he eventually became editor-in-chief .

From 1914 to 1918 De Witte took part in the First World War. In 1918 he began to work in the German-Bohemian movement for state independence. In 1919 he was appointed to the Czechoslovak National Assembly as a member of the DSAP. During the further years of the First Czechoslovak Republic (1919-1938) he was a member of the party executive committee of the DSAP and temporarily served as its deputy chairman.

After De Witte had already been elected to the city council of Karlovy Vary in 1919 and temporarily served as deputy mayor of the city, he succeeded in being elected as a member of the national parliament of Czechoslovakia in Prague on the occasion of the Czechoslovak parliamentary elections in 1925. In the elections of 1929 and 1935 he was able to defend his mandate, so that he was a member of the Czechoslovak Parliament for a total of thirteen years, from 1925 to 1938.

In 1922 he resigned from the Catholic Church.

After the annexation of the Sudeten areas in 1938 and the defeat of the rest of the Czech Republic by the Wehrmacht in 1939 , De Witte emigrated to Great Britain. There he belonged to the leadership of the London "trust community of the exile group of the Sudeten German Social Democrats" around Wenzel Jaksch .

After his escape to Great Britain, at the end of the 1930s, De Witte was targeted by the National Socialists ' police officers , who classified him as an important target: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people belonging to the Nazi surveillance apparatus have been classified as particularly dangerous or important. In the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, these persons should be located and arrested by the SS special commandos .

In 1945/1946 De Witte campaigned against the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia .

literature

• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss : Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 , Vol. I (Politics, Economy, Public Life), Munich 1980, p. 826.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .