Georg Schmidt (politician, 1875)

Georg Schmidt

Georg Schmidt (born November 22, 1875 in Biebrich , † February 22, 1946 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( SPD ). He was a member of the Prussian state assembly and from 1920 to 1933 a member of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic.

Life

Schmidt attended elementary school from 1882 to 1889 and later became a gardener. He joined the General German Gardeners Association in 1898 , at the time he was living in Hamburg where he was looking for work. He finally found work in Mannheim, where he worked in the profession he had learned until 1904. In Mannheim he later joined the Edelweiß gardening association , which on September 30, 1899, at Schmidt's instigation, joined the General German Gardeners Association. Schmidt was committed to joining the gardeners' association to the general commission of the German trade unions . Since 1900 he advocated for it and with the vote on September 6, 1903, which had been initiated by him, he reached a two-thirds majority, which voted for the merger. Schmidt became a full-time functionary of the gardeners' union on April 1, 1904, and as such was responsible for southern Germany. It was based in Frankfurt am Main.

politics

labor union

After Schmidt became managing director and member of the main board of the General German Gardeners Association in 1905 , he was elected 1st chairman of the organization in 1907. He replaced the honorary chairman Jakob Loches . Under Schmidt, the gardeners 'association developed into a gardeners' union with strong representation of the interests of all working gardeners in Germany, which in 1909 already had over 5,000 members. Schmidt resigned from his office in April 1909 to take over the board of directors of the newly founded association of agricultural, forest and vineyard workers in Germany , which later became the German agricultural workers' association . He remained chairman of this union until 1933. Schmidt was also an honorary board member of the free trade unions and from 1919 to 1931 a member of the board of the General German Trade Union Confederation . From 1924 he was secretary of the International Federation of Agricultural Workers .

houses of Parliament

From 1919 to 1921 he was a member of the Prussian state assembly for the SPD. From June 30, 1920 to November 18, 1920 and from February 8, 1924 to 1933, he was a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council and from June 1920 to May 1924 as a member of the German Reichstag as a member of constituency 6 (Pomerania). He was re-elected in 1924 on the SPD's proposal for the Reichstag election and was a member of the Reichstag again until June 1933. He wrote numerous papers on the wage and employment conditions of the agricultural and forestry workers and contributed to the assessment of the situation of the German agricultural workers.

During his time in the Reichstag, during the Weimar Republic, he was a member of several public corporations, such as the board of directors of the Deutsche Ratenbank-Kreditanstalt, and he was also an expert at the League of Nations on the agricultural crisis. From September 1930 he was a member of the board of trustees of the Institute for Economic Research, a research facility of the Reichsbahn and Reichspost, of the leading associations of industry and banks, of the cooperatives and the trade unions. At the end of the Weimar Republic, the results of the institute largely served the trade unions as an information aid. In May 1933 Schmidt was taken into protective custody. During the National Socialist era, he continued to maintain close contact with trade union and social democratic like-minded people, and after the end of the war he was a member of the agricultural policy committee of the Berlin SPD. Schmidt died of cardiac paralysis in Berlin on February 22, 1946.

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 Georg Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Georg Schmidt in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Friedrich Ebert Foundation: Biographical lexicon of the ÖTV and its predecessor organizations