Jürgen Jürgensen (politician, 1883)

Jürgen Rudolf Johann Juergensen (born July 24, 1883 in Langholz (Waabs) , † August 31, 1950 in Schönkirchen ) was a German trade unionist and politician ( USPD , SPD ).

Life

He was the son of the fisherman Friedrich Jürgensen (* 1859, † before Malmö January 26, 1906), who was active in the timber trade with Sweden from 1883. After elementary school, he first worked as a farm worker on large estates. Later he worked in a construction company, from 1912 he was the owner of a pipe and tobacco shop in Eckernförde. Around 1905 he joined the SPD and the free trade unions . In doing so, he initially concentrated on trade union work. In 1909 he was elected chairman of the Eckernförde, Borby and Windeby local association. In the summer of 1917 he left the SPD together with over 80% of the local party members and joined the newly founded USPD. The military command in Altona then sent him a draft for military service at Verdun . There he also experienced the chaos at the end of the war, the dissolution of the army and the surrender. With part of the USPD, he returned to the SPD in 1922.

In 1918 he became a member and deputy chairman of the first workers 'and soldiers' council with responsibility for housing supply. He was a co-founder of the GWU (non-profit housing company Eckernförde).

In the spring of 1920 the Kapp - Lüttwitz- Putsch began in Berlin . His goal was the elimination of the republic, the whole red ghost and the restoration of an old Prussian state. The putsch was carried out with great severity in Eckernförde and Kiel. Jürgensen and others were abducted. After giving up the leadership of the putsch in Berlin, he regained his freedom while the occupation by the putschists continued. He managed to end the coup without bloodshed.

From 1920 he was secretary of the trade union cartel in Eckernförde and headed the legal information office there. From 1918 to 1921 he was also an alderman of the district administrator of the Eckernförde district . He then belonged to the city council until 1925, then again from 1928 to 1932, and was temporarily its deputy chairman. His wife Katharina (called Christine) Jürgensen was one of the first female representatives in a city council for two years.

From 1921 to 1933 he was a member of the Prussian state parliament, initially for the USPD and from 1922 for the SPD . From 1923 to 1933 he was managing director of the SPD parliamentary group. In 1929 Jürgensen moved to Berlin with his three youngest children, but kept his constituency. In the great battle in the state parliament on May 25, 1932 between the members of the NSDAP and the KPD, he was seriously injured in the head as a bystander.

At the beginning of National Socialist rule he organized support for the families of political prisoners in prison. He gained precise knowledge of the conditions in the concentration camps early on. In particular, reports from Esterwegen about the fate of Ernst Heilmann (former leader of the SPD parliamentary group in Prussia) and Heinrich Hirtsiefer (former Prussian minister for public welfare and member of the center) shocked him deeply. He tried to pass this information on in a variety of ways. So Jürgensen turned to the former city councilor of Wedding, the cathedral priest of St. Hedwig (from 1938 cathedral provost ), Bernhard Lichtenberg . The Gestapo covered by means of a V-man on the compounds held by Jürgensen. At the instigation of the deputy Reichsleiter of the secret state police Dr. Werner Best was arrested on October 12, 1935 and interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters. He was then deported to the Esterwegen concentration camp and later to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In Esterwegen in particular, he was severely abused physically and mentally. No formal charge was ever brought. Several applications for release from custody were rejected by the deputy Gestapo chief Best as well as by the head of the concentration camp, Theodor Eicke . After nine months the Gestapo revealed the reason for the arrest: "sedition and atrocity propaganda". Only after declarations of guarantees by the family was he released from prison on October 17, 1936 as terminally ill and completely exhausted. He never fully recovered from the consequences until his death.

After two loss-making bomb attacks, he and his wife moved to Hamburg in 1944 to live with their son Nikolaus Jürgensen. In 1945 he helped found the SPD in Schleswig-Holstein. He was a candidate of the SPD for the office of Upper President of Schleswig-Holstein. From 1946 to 1948 he was director of the Schleswig-Holstein Landgesellschaft in Kiel. In this function he was responsible for the creation of settler farms, land reform and providing the population with housing. The population of Schleswig-Holstein had increased by more than 50% from 1.6 million before 1944 to 2.7 million in 1948.

Jürgensen died a few weeks after the state elections in 1950, which dashed all hopes for the SPD to continue the reforms that had begun.

Jürgensen is the father of the politician Nikolaus Jürgensen .

literature

• Committed to freedom. Memorial book of the German social democracy in the 20th century. , Schüren, Marburg 2000, pp. 162-163.

Web links

• Biography of Jürgen Juergensen . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
• Anke Göttsch History of Social Democracy