Hermann Jahn (politician)

Tomb in the main cemetery in Erfurt.

Hermann Jahn (born March 28, 1894 in Ilmenau , † April 15, 1946 in Erfurt ) was a German communist politician and anti-fascist resistance fighter . Shortly before his death, he was Lord Mayor of Erfurt for a few months .

Political biography

1919 to 1932

Hermann Jahn was one of the founding members of the Erfurt local association of the KPD , which was constituted on January 2, 1919. The comparatively small group - presumably only about 20 people took part in the founding meeting in the restaurant "Cardinal" - had a difficult position in the first few years against the USPD, which dominated the local labor movement, and an anarcho-syndicalist current that was numerous and influential in Erfurt at that time who tried several times to take over the local club.

In the crisis years after the First World War , the trained porcelain caster and locksmith Jahn distinguished himself as a local activist and functionary of the party. Among other things, he was involved in the development of regional structures of the “ proletarian hundreds ”, which had been massively promoted since the late summer of 1923 , which were organized from the Prussian Erfurt for the surrounding Thuringian area. On October 21, 1923, 16 Erfurt communists, including Hermann Jahn, were arrested for these activities on direct instructions from the Upper President of the Province of Saxony Hörsing in preparation for the dismissal of the left-wing social-democratic Thuringian Prime Minister August Frölich . Two days later, a solidarity demonstration organized by the KPD took place, which was shot at by police in front of the main post office on the Anger . One rally participant was killed and several others were seriously injured. Jahn was released from prison on November 12th without charge.

In the last few years of the Weimar Republic, he was promoted to full-time functionary and headed the Erfurt sub-district of the KPD, which developed into a stable stronghold. Jahn - most recently also city councilor - achieved some notable successes in mobilization during this period (for example a rally attended by almost 40,000 people in the "Mitteldeutsche Kampfbahn" - today's Steigerwald Stadium - on July 21, 1932) as well as the structural overtaking of the local SPD , which was part of the numerous elections in Erfurt between 1930 and 1933 consistently fared significantly worse than the KPD. In the Reichstag elections of September 14, 1930 , the KPD achieved a share of the vote of 22.2% and thus temporarily became the strongest party in the city, ahead of the SPD (18.0%) and the NSDAP (16.9%).

1933 to 1939

On February 1, 1933, the Erfurt district president banned all public events of the KPD. The terror of the police and SA , which began before the fire in the Reichstag , cost the lives of several locally exposed communists within a few months (Werner Uhlworm, Kurt Beate, Josef Ries, Heinz Sendhoff, Waldemar Schapiro).

At first Jahn was able to hide himself successfully and out of illegality, together with the instructor Heinz Frommhold, who had been assigned by the KPD's district leadership who had moved to Leipzig, preserved the substance of the sub-district's cohesion. Until well into 1934, around 800 party members are said to have paid regular contributions in Erfurt and the surrounding area. On June 6, 1935, the state police station in Erfurt assessed in a status report that “the KPD (...) had well over 30% of the workforce behind it”.

However, the remaining branches of the party were largely smashed by 1937 or disintegrated by themselves in view of the ongoing illegality; in any case, an activity linked to former legal structures was no longer successful. Jahn was also arrested and sentenced to prison, but was initially released in 1936. A circle of former party members and sympathizers formed around him, who regularly met for discussions in the context of supposed “family celebrations” and “skat evenings”. This largely passive circle was also subject to the harshest repression - between 1933 and 1945 around 80 Erfurt communists were killed by force or illness in concentration camps, prisons and penitentiaries, and a further 582 were sentenced to a total of 1,537 years in prison. Former party functionary Fritz Noack, who was particularly committed to Jahn on the eve of the outbreak of war , was arrested in July 1939 and murdered by Gestapo officers on the grounds of the Petersberg Citadel in early August .

1942 to 1944

In autumn 1941, the former Erfurt teacher Theodor Neubauer , who at that time lived in Tabarz , and the Jena worker Magnus Poser - initially independently of one another - took the initiative to rebuild a district organization of the KPD in Thuringia. In the spring of 1942, Poser met Hermann Jahn in Erfurt, who from then on worked in coordination with Neubauer and Poser in several companies in Erfurt (Stübgen lamp factory, Erfurt repair shop (REWE) , former Henry Pels machine factory , Olympia-Büromaschinenwerke , JA Topf & Sons , Telefunken ) instructed newly created or reactivated KPD cells and focused primarily on the sabotage of ongoing war production, the distribution of leaflets and sticky notes, and contact with forced laborers. In the following two years Jahn directly coordinated the most active and effective phase of anti-fascist work in the largest city in Thuringia. Against the background of an increasingly radicalized and at the same time refined practice of persecution, he was constantly in immediate danger of discovery and life.

Between June and August 1944, the organization established by Neubauer and Poser was systematically dismantled by the Gestapo. In contrast to other branches of the widely ramified organization, the Erfurt structure for which Hermann Jahn was responsible was apparently not infiltrated by informers and was therefore initially not affected by the arrests. However, Jahn, his colleague Willy Albrecht and a number of other Erfurt activists were independently arrested a short time later as part of the Grid Action and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp , where they remained until the liberation in April 1945. As a result, in the autumn of 1944 the operating cells that had been set up two years earlier largely disintegrated; a resistance organized on a comparable level did not take place in Erfurt until the end of the war.

1945 to 1946

By order of the American city commander, Erfurt's NSDAP mayor Kießling was dismissed on April 15, 1945 and the non-party businessman Otto Gerber was appointed to this position. Jahn returned to Erfurt around this point and immediately began to rebuild the KPD subdistrict. By April 26, he had gathered about 100 former party members. Jahn was initially only able to operate illegally or at best semi-legally, as the occupying power had forbidden any party political activity and punished violations in this regard - for example in Jena and Gotha - quite harshly. In April, Jahn initiated the collection of all tangible anti-Nazi groups and individuals within the framework of an "anti-fascist committee", which criticized the city commanders and the new mayor for their staffing policy on leaflets and demanded the removal of all proven National Socialists from administration, offices and companies, but here was only very partially successful. In addition, the committee tried to force the formation of free trade unions . This was also prevented by the city commandant.

On July 3, 1945, the Red Army entered Erfurt; this enabled the KPD to appear legally again after more than twelve years. Four days later, the Soviet city commandant Urew Otto Gerber resigned from his position and appointed Hermann Jahn Lord Mayor of the city. Within a few days, the new head of administration dismissed around 400 civil servants and employees with Nazi charges and filled the vacant positions with anti-fascists who were gradually returning from concentration camps and prisons. In addition to the political safeguarding of the new beginning, Jahn's attention was directed to the resumption of production and the restructuring of the school system, but above all to the accommodation and care of the people in the city, whose population had risen to over 200,000 within a few months due to the almost 50,000 resettlers who had arrived . Jahn, whose health was already compromised on his return from Buchenwald, only took part informally in the further regional and supra-regional development of his party during this time. He did not hold any prominent offices or functions in the Thuringian KPD, and in 1945 he handed over management of the Erfurt sub-district to Fritz Gäbler . Even locally, after the formation of the bloc of anti-fascist democratic parties in August 1945, he no longer appears to have emerged as a party politician. He evidently did not appear in bodies and committees that prepared the merger of the SPD and KPD to form the SED . It remains unclear whether this is due to his continuously deteriorating state of health or a possibly demonstratively “non-partisan” view of his mayor's office.

Jahn died a few days after the SED was founded on April 7, 1946 in Gotha for Thuringia in an Erfurt hospital. Georg Boock succeeded him in the office of Lord Mayor on May 5, 1946 .

Subject of the politics of remembrance

The renaming of Erfurt Schlösserstraße to Hermann-Jahn-Straße after Jahn's death was reversed in 1990 by the now CDU- led city administration. A former company vocational school named after him no longer exists in this form and has dropped his name - which has thus been completely erased from public memory.

Private

His son was the SED politician Günther Jahn (1930-2015).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Gutsche, Willibald (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Erfurt, 2nd edition Weimar 1989, p. 376. From now on cited as Gutsche, Geschichte.
2. ↑ See the recorded reports of the party veterans Karl Reimann and Karl Klein, Annexes VII and VIII, in: Gutsche, Willibald, The revolutionary movement in Erfurt during the 1st imperialist world war and the November revolution, Erfurt 1963, pp. 214-217, and Schulze , Gerhard, The November Revolution 1918 in Thuringia, Erfurt 1976, p. 149.
3. ↑ See Gutsche, Revolutionary Movement, p. 181.
4. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, pp. 392, 399.
5. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 400.
6. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 401.
7. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, pp. 426, 428 and Ludwig, Kurt, Der Kampf der Erfurter Arbeiter gegen den Faschismus 1931 to 1932, Erfurt 1957, p. 35.
8. ↑ See Börnert, Gottfried (et al.), Documents and materials on the history of the district party organization of the KPD Großthüringen 1929-1933, Erfurt 1983, p. 259.
9. ↑ See the statistical material (Table IV) in Raßloff, Steffen, Flucht in die nationale Volksgemeinschaft. The Erfurt bourgeoisie between the Empire and the Nazi dictatorship, Cologne-Weimar-Wien 2003, p. 428.
10. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 433ff.
11. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 446.
12. ↑ Quoted from Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 446.
13. ↑ ^{a b} See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 449.
14. ↑ See Collet, Rosemarie, On the Struggle for the Creation of the Unity of the Working Class in Erfurt (1945/46), in: Museen der Stadt Erfurt (Ed.), Contributions to the History of Thuringia, Erfurt 1968, p. 113.
15. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, pp. 454f.
16. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 459.
17. ↑ District Commission for Research into the History of the Local Labor Movement (ed.), Chronicle of the History of the Labor Movement in Thuringia 1945 to 1952, Erfurt 1975, p. 9.
18. ↑ See Chronicle 1945 to 1952, p. 12 and Fuchs, Ludwig, The occupation of Thuringia by the American troops. The obstruction of the struggle of the KPD, in: Contributions to history, p. 79f.
19. ↑ See generally Benser, Günter, The KPD in the year of liberation. Preparation and establishment of the legal communist mass party, Berlin 1985, p. 107ff.
20. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 469 and Fuchs, Besetzung, p. 99ff.
21. ↑ See Chronicle 1945 to 1952, p. 10.
22. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 469.
23. ↑ See Anweiler, Änne, On the history of the unification of KPD and SPD in Thuringia 1945-1946, Erfurt 1971, p. 72 and Eggerath, Werner, The happy confession. One year of my life, Berlin 1975, p. 226.
24. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, pp. 475, 480.
25. ↑ See the information in Broszat, Martin, Weber, Hermann (eds.), SBZ-Handbuch. State administrations, parties, social organizations and their leaders in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany 1945-1949, Munich 1990, p. 458.
26. ↑ See Eggerath, p. 263.
27. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, pp. 478, 485f., 490 and Eggerath, p. 263.
28. ↑ See Gutsche, Geschichte, p. 491.