Jack Slate

Jack Slate (1967)

Jack Schiefer (born April 16, 1898 in Sinnersdorf ; † January 29, 1980 in Erkelenz ) was a German social democrat , resistance fighter and political prisoner during the Nazi era . In 1945 he became the first district administrator and in 1946 senior district director in what was then the district of Erkelenz . Later he was head of the department for labor and social affairs at the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg . Jack Schiefer published numerous books.

Life

Jack Schiefer was born out of wedlock as Jakob Erpenbach on April 16, 1898 in Sinnersdorf near Cologne and was later adopted by his stepfather, which is why he took the family name Schiefer.

After elementary school he worked as a cattle keeper in the agriculture of his hometown. During the First World War, at the age of 18, from May 1916 to April 1917 he was in the field as a volunteer infantryman on the French front in Alsace. From 1917 to 1926 he worked as a hammer in the Cologne railway forge and had taken part in the Battle of the Ruhr in 1923 .

Jack Schiefer was self-taught and, thanks to a scholarship from the Catholic Workers 'Movement , he attended the technical college for economics and administration in Düsseldorf from 1926 to 1928 , became a workers' secretary , and in May 1928 obtained an examination at the Prussian Ministry of Culture and was granted the right to study without a secondary school leaving certificate. In addition to his job, he studied economics at the University of Cologne , where he graduated as a graduate economist in the winter semester of 1931/32 and in 1933 as a Dr. rer. pole. PhD . His diploma thesis with Bruno Kuske had the topic: The basics of the history of the German free trade unions since the repeal of the socialist law .

Wanted as a social democrat, trade unionist and avowed opponent of Hitler's henchmen, he emigrated to Amsterdam in 1933 , where he was a research assistant at the economic and historical library of the Dutch social democrat and political scientist Professor Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus (1880-1960), who in turn had good contacts entertained the top functionaries of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in exile in Prague . The library was transferred to the International Institute for Social History , also founded by Professor Posthumus in 1935 , which was their conspiratorial meeting place during the time of the Amsterdam exile of many social democrats.

From Amsterdam, Jack Schiefer organized resistance against Hitler in a group of other emigrated union leaders, social democratic members of the Reichstag and officials. Belonged to this group

• Erich Kuttner , Jew, member of the Prussian state parliament and editor of the party newspaper Vorwärts , who was later murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camp,
• Franz Vogt , member of the Prussian state parliament and editor of the Bergarbeiter-Zeitung , who took his own life when the Germans occupied Amsterdam in May 1940,
• Toni Reissner , Chairman of the General Association of the Transport Industry, who died for the same reason,
• Gerd Schreiner, editor who was slain by the Gestapo in Amsterdam,
• Werner Auerbach, editor who escaped to England,
• Helmut Kern, editor who managed to escape to the USA,
• Fritz Schröder , member of the Reichstag and leader of the white-collar union , who was killed in a traffic accident.

You were the author and editor of the emigrant newspaper Freie Presse , published in Amsterdam, and you wrote for the Socialist Action and the Dutch workers' newspaper Het Volk .

The Amsterdam emigrants were supported by Dutch comrades, such as the secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation , Edo Fimmen, who was known among organized seafarers in all ports of the world and who smuggled the SPD's illegal writings on Rhine ships into the German Reich.

With all this, Jack Schiefer carried out news and courier services between the Reich and abroad and took part in the foreign conferences of social democrats under the code name "Niemöller", which Fritz Schröder had given him, where he met Otto Wels , Erich Ollenhauer , and Rudolf Hilferding and others of the party executive from Prague met and gave speeches.

On July 20, 1935, Jack Schiefer was arrested on a courier trip to the Reich because of a denunciation in front of the train station in Erkelenz and imprisoned in the local police prison, which was located in the old town hall , until noon . He was handed over to the Gestapo and held in their torture cellars. On December 11, 1936, he was sentenced by the 2nd Senate of the People's Court to two and a half years in prison for preparing for high treason . "If the extent of my illegal activity had been proven, I would no longer be alive," he later wrote.

In the formally against “Runge u. a. “ There were 18 defendants, among them 18 defendants, because of the preparation for high treason by disseminating illegal writings that took place on only six days of trial in Düsseldorf

• Hermann Runge , later a member of the Bundestag,
• Ludwig Philipp Lude , later District President in Aachen ,
• Franz Bott, who was again active in Cologne in the " National Committee Free Germany " in autumn 1944 ,
• Willi Schirrmacher , Member of the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1962 to 1970 ,
• Adam Romboy, Mayor of Mönchengladbach - Rheindahlen from 1946 to 1949 , board member of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt , a street and a senior citizens' home of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt are named after him,
• Ernst Alex, 1946 chief town director of Rheydt , 1947 to 1967 town director of Viersen ,
• Heinrich Hamacher , Member of the Bundestag from 1957 to 1969 ,
• Wilhelm Kattwinkel, after whom a street in Lüdenscheid is named today,
• Ernst Gnoss , from 1946 to 1949 Member of the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia , from 1946 to 1948 State Parliament and State Parliament Vice-President, from 1948 until his death in 1949 Minister for Reconstruction,
• Sebastian Dani , later mayor and city director of Bonn .

They had all contributed in one way or another to the illegal distribution of publications against the Nazi dictatorship. Two defendants were acquitted, and the rest to prison terms of between one year and four months in prison and nine years prison sentenced.

The senior Reich lawyer had demanded 10 years in prison for Jack Schiefer , but neither his appearance under the name of the sought-after "Niemöller", who was believed to be the head of the organization, nor participation in the distribution of publications, but only participation in two international conferences the SPD in Liège and Antwerp . According to the grounds of the judgment, it was both justifying and aggravating the punishment “that the activity of slate had to be viewed as particularly dangerous at the two conferences ... Even the presence and speeches of a man of the intellectual format of slate ... had to raise the hopes of the conference participants for a success Increase illegal work and give them the feeling that Schiefer was on their side in the fight against the Third Reich. ”In mitigating the sentence, the court took into account, “ that the defendant Schiefer did his duty in the war, in 1923 in the defense of the French Ruhreinbruch and in the fight against the separatists to a considerable extent for Germany and thereby u. a. even blew up a Rhine bridge. "

According to the court files, the 2nd Senate of the People's Court was occupied by People's Court Councilor Hartmann as presiding judge, District Court Director Zieger as judge, Lieutenant Colonel Stutzer as judge, Colonel Schroers as judge, SS-Obergruppenführer Josias zu Waldeck and Pyrmont as judge, Chief Public Prosecutor Peich as public prosecutor's office , Legal Secretary Semmelrogge as clerk of the office.

Declaration from 1945

Jack Schiefer was imprisoned in Lüttringhausen prison . His defense attorney Paul Mehlkopf, a senior partner in the office of the later Federal Finance Minister Franz Etzel , managed to get him released early on Christmas 1938 on probation. Jack Schiefer stayed in Germany after his release and worked as a managing director in the industry, but was repeatedly subjected to interrogation and abuse by the Gestapo.

During the Second World War he kept a secret diary which he published in 1947. Despite being "unworthy of military service", he was called up twice for the 999 Penal Battalion . The first time in January 1944 he escaped with the help of friends, the second time in January 1945 he went into hiding.

After Erkelenz was captured by the American army on February 26, 1945, Jack Schiefer returned from Sinnersdorf to the city on March 19, 1945 . Ten days later he was appointed civil representative by the American military government and on April 20, 1945, he was appointed district administrator of the then Erkelenz district . In February 1946 he was elected by the district council as chief district director. From August 1947 on he was an advisor to the Minister of Labor in Düsseldorf and finally, with his recommendation, from 1951 as 'one of the best specialists in his country', he was head of the department for labor and social affairs at the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg , the forerunner of today's EU . During this time he was also a visiting professor at the University of Cologne .

After his retirement in 1963 he returned to Erkelenz , where he was a long-time member of the city council and died on January 29, 1980.

Jack Schiefer was a co-founder of the first German school of journalism ( Aachen , 1945), the author of countless essays and a dozen books of a scientific and aesthetic nature.

Honors

• In Erkelenz the Dr.-Jack-Schiefer-Straße was named after him.
• The Erkelenz route against oblivion commemorates the resistance fighter with a plaque on the old town hall.

Works

• Poems from twenty years . 1940, only partially published
• The prison ballad . Heinrich Hollands publishing house, Aachen 1946
• Guide to the history of the free trade unions in Germany from 1890-1932 . Heinrich Hollands publishing house, Aachen 1946
• History of the German trade unions . Grenzland-Verlag Heinrich Hollands, Aachen 1946
• The trade unions in economic and social life . Grenzland-Verlag Heinrich Hollands, Aachen 1947
• Diary of an unworthy of defense . Grenzland-Verlag Heinrich Hollands, Aachen 1947
• On the sociology of the German trade unions . Grenzland-Verlag Heinrich Hollands, Aachen 1947
• Destruction and reconstruction in the Erkelenz district . Grenzland-Verlag Heinrich Hollands, Aachen 1948
• The social security system in the United States . Lutzeyer's continuation works, Frankfurt / M., Bonn 1952
• European labor market, free movement and mobility of workers . Verlag August Lutzeyer, Baden-Baden, Bonn 1961
  • Marché du Travail Européen . Paris 1961
  • Il Mercato del Lavoro in Europe . Milan 1961
  • De Europese labor market . Leiden 1961

Editorships

• Union publication series . Grenzland-Verlag Heinrich Hollands, Aachen 1946 ff
• German tariff archive . Amboss-Verlag Dr. Schiefer, Erkelenz 1949 ff
• European social reports . Verlag August Lutzeyer, Baden-Baden, Bonn 1963 ff
• EURISI, European and International Social Information . Eurobuch-Verlag August Lutzeyer, Freudenstadt 1965 ff

Lore

• Documents from the unpublished written estate in private hands, including the indictment and judgment before the People's Court .
• Some letters from Jack and Martha Schiefer are in the Franz Vogt Collection at the International Institute for Social History

literature

• It wasn't just July 20th…. Documents from a series on West German television, WDR Cologne 1979, Jugenddienstverlag Wuppertal 1979 ISBN 3-7795-7342-3 , page 62 ff.
• Pulheimer contributions to history and local history. Association for history and local history V., Volume 6, Pulheim 1982, ISSN  0171-3426 , page 132 ff.
• W. Frenken et al. a .: National Socialism in the Heinsberg district. Museum publications of the district of Heinsberg, Volume 4, self-published by the district of Heinsberg, Heinsberg 1983, page 105 ff.
• From the history of the Erkelenzer Land. Writings of the Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande e. V., Volume 12, Erkelenz 1992, page 223 ff.
• Andreas Amberg: Writer in the Erkelenzer Land. Writings of the Heimatverein der Erkelenzer Lande e. V., Volume 13, Erkelenz 1993, page 83 ff.
• Margit Szöllösi-Janze , Andreas Freitäger: Doctorate revoked! Withdrawal of academic titles at the University of Cologne 1933 to 1945. Kirsch-Verlag, Nümbrecht 2005, ISBN 3-933586-42-9 , page 105 ff.