Hans Weber (politician, 1895)

Hans Weber (born January 23, 1895 in Mühldorf am Inn ; † January 15, 1986 ) was a German KPD politician .

Origin and youth

Hans Weber was the son of a tiled stove setter and was only able to attend elementary school because of the family's poverty. Because of his very good handwriting, however, he found a job as a typist. In Speyer he joined the workers' youth movement in 1913, but in 1914 turned against the policies of the SPD leadership, which supported the imperial government's war course. In 1917, after its establishment, he switched to the USPD immediately . Within the USPD Weber founded the society "Ideal" as a kind of "cover organization" of the Spartacus group . In 1919, when the KPD was founded, Weber became a member of the new party, but remained in the USPD until 1920.

Promotion in the KPD

Weber began his KPD career in 1919 as a sub-district leader in the Palatinate and was elected to the central committee of the KPD in 1920. At the beginning of 1923 he was appointed full-time secretary of the KPD district of the Palatinate, who represented a left-opposition tendency which in 1924 became the majority trend. However, when in 1925 the central committee disintegrated around a "left" direction around Ruth Fischer and Ernst Thälmann and an "ultra-left" direction around Werner Scholem , Arthur Rosenberg and Iwan Katz , Weber joined the "ultra left". At the 10th party congress of the KPD in Berlin in 1925, he was one of the spokesmen for this ultra-left. From a concession he was elected to the new Central Committee together with Arthur Rosenberg and Werner Scholem , although the ultra-left only represented a minority of the delegates at the Berlin party congress.

Leaving the party

Despite his membership in the central committee, Weber was active in the left opposition and one of the co-signers of the "Letter of the 700", which protested against the direction around Ernst Thalmann . When this ultra-left opposition fell apart, he joined the Weddinger opposition with the Palatinate district . Hans Weber lived in the Berlin district of Wedding and was the actual leader of this left opposition group, which was also called the Weddinger-Palatinate opposition because of its connection to the Palatinate. At the 1927 party congress he was no longer elected to the Central Committee, but was initially still an employee of the Central Committee. On March 14, 1928, he was expelled from the KPD because he had participated in a Reich conference of the opposition.

Further career

After he was active for some time in the group “ Left Bolshevik Leninists ” in the Palatinate, Weber withdrew from active politics at the end of 1929 and worked as an advertiser for the international workers' aid . His application for re-entry into the KPD was rejected in October 1930. After 1933 Hans Weber was under police supervision, eventually working as an advertiser for the magazine Der Deutsche, a former trade union paper that had been taken over by the German Labor Front .

In 1943 Weber was made an employee of BASF and stayed with the company until his retirement after the end of the war. He joined the SPD in 1946, but later left the party. Hans Weber died on January 15, 1986.

His brother Joseph Weber was also a member of the KPD and from 1924 was a member of the state parliament in Bavaria .

literature

• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
• Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Essen 2014. ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3 .