Hans Meier (resistance fighter)

Hans Ludwig Meier (also Hans Meier-Wittlake , born August 26, 1914 in Bremen ; † November 12, 2000 in Bremen) was a German " communist in the resistance ", editor and writer.

Life

Meier comes from a working class family in Bremen. His father was a bricklayer, his mother a factory worker. His father died in a war hospital in 1918, his mother married the communist and inland waterway boatman August Wittlake in 1920. Through him, Hans Meier got access to world literature and became a reader of the workers' library in Hastedt . After graduating from elementary school, he trained as a painter from 1929 to 1933. He was a. a. employed at the Atlas shipyard in Bremen. When his stepfather died in 1931, Hans Meier joined the KJVD and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

From May 1933 Meier took part in the underground struggle against National Socialism and was arrested for the first time in November 1933. In the fall of 1936 his resistance group was discovered and he was charged along with eight other communists. From 1936 to 1939 he spent a few years in the Bremen-Ostertor prison because of his resistance work against the National Socialist regime . During his imprisonment, he had access to a prison library whose book inventory was not sufficiently censored by the Nazis; he discovered his love for literature.

He was released from prison in April 1939, but placed under police supervision until 1945. Despite the prison sentence, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in August 1939 . He was deployed in France in 1940 and in the winter of 1941/1942 in the Soviet Union, where he suffered severe frostbite. Because of "persistent stomach ulcers" he was subsequently declared unfit for front duty. Before the end of the war, he resumed his political activities and participated in the establishment of the Combat Group against Fascism (KGF). Then he became the KPD local group leader in habenhausen . From 1949 he was a member of the KPD state leadership in Bremen. From 1956 to 1960 he worked at a shipyard in the Bremen port area, where he became chairman of the works council and IG Metall functionary.

After the liberation in 1945 he became editor of the Tribune of Democracy run by Willy Hundertmark (daily newspaper of the KPD in Bremen until 1956) and from 1960 to 1969 editor of the socialist weekly newspaper Neues Echo . From 1969 he took on various party functions in the newly constituted DKP , particularly in press and public relations. Until his death he was an active member of the Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime - Association of Antifascists in Bremen.

Fonts (selection)

• Back in April. Everyday stories of small and large crooks, of war and peace and of resistance. With 12 illustrations by Niko Timm . Edited by the working group literature in the world of work . Bund-Verlag: Cologne 1990
• Colony Raffgier , illustrated by Nico Timm and an afterword by Thomas Metscher . Publisher Atelier im Bauernhaus: Fischerhude 1976

literature

• Hendrik Bunke: The KPD in Bremen. 1945–1968 (= dissertation University of Bremen 2001.) PapyRossa , Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-89438-230-9 . ( Online version , PDF , 3.8 MB)
• John Gerardu: Contemporary witnesses: Hans Meier. in: Bremen antifascist. 8/88, Bremen 1988.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Meier in the catalog of the German National Library