Hans Vogel (politician, 1881)

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Hans Vogel (1932)
The grave of Hans Vogel and his wife Dina in the Westfriedhof (Nuremberg) .

Johann Vogel (born February 16, 1881 in Oberartelshofen an der Pegnitz , † October 6, 1945 in London ) was a German politician . He was chairman of the SPD from 1931 to 1933 and chairman of the SPD in exile from 1933 to 1945 .

Life and work

After attending elementary school in Fürth , Vogel, the son of a small trader and shoemaker, completed an apprenticeship as a wood sculptor's assistant from 1894 to 1897. In 1897 he joined the sculptors' union . He worked as a journeyman in various parts of Germany until 1908.

Political activity in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic

Vogel was a board member of the social democratic electoral association in Fürth from 1907 to 1911. From 1908 he worked as the secretary of the Franconian district association . From 1912 to 1918 he was a member of the Second Chamber of the Bavarian State Parliament , at the beginning of the war he supported the attitude of the party leadership, which saw the war as a "patriotic obligation" ( Burgfriedenspolitik ), and participated as a soldier in World War I (as a radio operator in the radio department of the 105th Division ).

At the end of 1919 Vogel became a member of the Weimar National Assembly and remained a member of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic until June 1933 . He was a member of the National Assembly's “Committee for the Preliminary Consultation of the Draft Constitution of the German Reich ”.

During the November Revolution , Vogel supported Friedrich Ebert's positions on the Council of People's Representatives as a member of the Nuremberg Workers 'and Soldiers' Council and campaigned for the formation of a national assembly and against a soviet republic , which made him oppose the Munich soviet republic .

After Vogel had been a member of the party committee since 1920, he was elected to the party executive as secretary at the 1927 party congress in Kiel . In 1931 he became chairman of the SPD in Leipzig together with Arthur Crispien and Otto Wels .

On July 29, 1928 he held the consecration speech for the Ebert-Erzberger-Rathenau memorial in Osnabrück , which was erected there by the Reichsbanner .

Resistance and Exile

After the National Socialist "takeover" of power , Vogel went to Saarbrücken in 1933 , which at that time was the capital of the Saar region and was administered by the League of Nations . On June 2, 1933, he moved to Prague and in May 1938 went into exile in Paris , where he led the SPD's foreign organization ( Sopade ). In France, too, the pressure on exiles soon increased; in June 1940 Vogel had to flee to Great Britain via southern France, Spain and Portugal after a brief internment . As early as March 29, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the second expatriation list of the German Reich , in which his expatriation was announced.

After Wels's death in 1939, Vogel was the sole chairman of Sopade in Paris. After fleeing to London, he tried to unite the remnants of the emigrated German socialists within the framework of the Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain .

Today (after Crispien's exile in 1933 and Wels's death in 1939), Vogel is often regarded as party leader of the SPD until 1945. This assessment is based on his leading positions within the Sopade as a functionary. However, since the beginning of his exile in London, he was probably no longer chairman of a generally recognized “foreign headquarters” of the SPD with a recognized claim to leadership for German social democracy.

Vogel always rejected the idea of ​​a united front and thus the cooperation with communist socialists , even in times of persecution. He was no longer able to participate in the rebuilding of the SPD under Kurt Schumacher after the war, but he spoke out in favor of a parliamentary-democratic system for post-war Germany.

The Hans-Vogel-Straße in Fürth is named after Vogel .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ludwig Hoffmeyer: Chronicle of the city of Osnabrück . 6th edition. Meinders & Elstermann, Belm 1995, ISBN 3-88926-006-3 , p. 519 .
  2. Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order . De Gruyter Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 4 (first edition: 1985, reprint).