Heinrich Davidsen

Heinrich Davidsen (born October 6, 1891 in Flensburg , † July 2, 1963 in Quickborn ) was a German SPD politician and union secretary.

education and profession

Heinrich Davidsen attended elementary school in his hometown and then went to sea as a simple seaman. From 1911 to 1913 he did his military service in the Imperial Navy . During the First World War he attended the Flensburg Navigation School and left it in 1916 with a master's license. Until the end of the war he was in command of a minesweeper.

Politics and union

Heinrich Davidsen joined the trade union ( Central Association of Seafaring Workers in Germany ) on June 1, 1907 . He was a shop steward within his union until the beginning of the war (not during his military service).

In 1912 he joined the SPD and was for his party during the first years of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1920 in the workers 'and soldiers' council in his hometown. In addition, from 1919 he took over the honorary management of the port workers ' section of the German Transport Workers' Association and from 1920 he was employed full-time for his union in Swinoujscie . There he was also elected to the magistrate for the SPD from 1921 and sat on the party board of the Usedom -Wollin district (today Wolin ) as a cashier.

His trade union, which was now called the General Association of Public Enterprises for Passenger and Goods Traffic , sent him to Hamburg , where he took over the management of the Reichsfachgruppe Maritime Shipping ; this included national and international tasks. At the end of 1932, until his return to Hamburg a few months later, he worked at the headquarters of his union in Berlin. At that time he did not appear as a politician, neither in the SPD nor in the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , which he had also joined.

After the takeover of the Nazis he was dismissed from his post and not taught as a social democratic trade unionists about the employment office. As early as June 1933 he began illegal party work for the SPD and for the union. He took on the task of bringing social democratic press products from Belgium to the Hanseatic city. He was able to carry out this work undetected for nine months, but was then arrested and ill-treated on March 21, 1936. He was sentenced to two years in prison by the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court on charges of high treason . His offense was the acceptance of a package from the social democratic newspaper " Neuer Vorwärts ", which was banned in Nazi Germany.

In April 1936 he was released and after a year of unemployment he was able to work for a ship brokerage firm. Because of his illegal activities for the SPD in 1942 he was labeled as “unworthy of defense” and was often on the verge of being arrested again because of further illegal work. After the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 , when the pressure on opposition members of all shades increased again, he went into hiding.

After the end of the Nazi dictatorship, he became managing director of the General Association of Transport and Community Workers and when the trade unions for the Northwest region ( Schleswig-Holstein ) were officially re-established . Later he took over the district management of the newly founded trade union ÖTV . In his work, Davidsen tried to cleanse the shipping industry, which was still one of his main fields of work, of remaining National Socialist influences. He later became ÖTV district manager for Adolph K Bäumenuss in Hamburg and, from May 16, 1949, chairman of the Hamburg district of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB).

In the same year, on May 4th, he became a member of the first electoral term of the Hamburg Parliament . He was officially elected in the 2nd electoral term. Within the citizenry, he took on the role of 2nd chairman of the SPD parliamentary group. Because of a heart disease resulting from his imprisonment, he had to give up his union posts and political offices in 1953. He also resigned his seat in the citizenry.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The information in For Freedom and Democracy ... and the Biographical Lexicon differ in part. The lexicon says, among other things, that Davidsen was only dubbed “unworthy of defense” on November 1, 1944.

literature

• SPD Hamburg: For freedom and democracy. Hamburg Social Democrats in Persecution and Resistance 1933–1945 . Hamburg 2003, p. 50/51 ( books.google.de )

Web links

• Biographical lexicon of the ÖTV and its predecessor organizations