Jakob Altmaier

Jakob Altmaier (born November 23, 1889 in Flörsheim am Main , † February 8, 1963 in Bonn ) was a German resistance fighter and politician of the SPD .

Life and work

Altmaier took part in the First World War as a war volunteer. In 1918 he took part in the revolution in Frankfurt am Main , where he was editor of the Volksstimme from 1917 to 1919 .

He also worked as a journalist in the Weimar Republic , a. a. for the world stage , and as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian . He reported from Belgrade, Paris and London for the Social Democratic Press Service and Vorwärts . As a Jew and Social Democrat, he fled the Reich in 1933. He lived first in Paris (after the outbreak of the war as a prisoner in the Audierne camp ), later in the Balkans, in Spain and in Africa. His language skills, his social fluency, his Europe-wide political contacts, the SPD experience in propaganda and his journalistic skills, as well as his own revolutionary experiences of 1918 led him to assume a future defeat of the NS and to rely on the later allies to support.

In Yugoslavia he came into contact with the British secret service and with Serbian anti-fascist opposition. On behalf of the British "D Section", he and the agricultural scientist Alfred Becker had been producing a magazine Alarm in Croatian since autumn 1939 , as well as appeals to the German-speaking Danube Swabians and other leaflets against both the Nazis and the Communists. The two produced a magazine, Deutsche Mitteilungen , with a Serbian-language counterpart. Increasingly, they manufactured SPD-oriented and Catholic-oriented publications that were smuggled into Austria (through Slovenia and Hungary), which led to Altmaier's arrest. He was released under British pressure.

Altmaier was one of the few refugees from Germany who were ready to fight this country militantly. Above all, they attached the moral value to their work, not to despair in the face of Germany's initial successes in the war; they rightly rated the strategic value as low. After their organization in Yugoslavia was broken up, Altmaier and Becker worked in Churchill's SOE , Altmaier in Greece, and later from Cairo, from July 1940 . As SOE agents (Becker worked in Istanbul ), they embodied an unbroken will to resist during this successful phase of the Nazi regime and thus conveyed hope for the future to many other refugees.

In 1949 Altmaier returned to Germany. Until 1948 he was a correspondent for the social democratic newspapers Telegraf and Neuer Vorwärts .

Political party

Altmaier joined the SPD in 1913.

MP

Altmaier belonged to the German Bundestag from its first legislature from 1949 until his death for the constituency of Hanau . He is considered to be the initiator of the German-Israeli reparation agreement of 1952 ( Luxembourg Agreement ). From 1950 to 1963 he was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe .

Honors

Jakob-Altmaier-Strasse in Hanau and Altmaierstrasse in Flörsheim am Main are named after Altmaier. The city of Flörsheim has given him honorary citizenship.

literature

• Willy Albrecht: A trailblazer: Jakob Altmaier and the Luxembourg Agreement , in: Ludolf Herbst , restitution in the Federal Republic of Germany , Munich 1989, ISBN 3-486-54721-6 , pp. 205–213
  • dsb .: Jeanette Wolff , Jakob Altmaier, Peter Blachstein . The three Jewish members of the Bundestag up to the beginning of the sixties , in: Julius H. Schoeps ed. Life in the Land of the Offenders , Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-934658-17-2 , pp. 236-253
• Christoph Moß: Jakob Altmaier. A Jewish Social Democrat in Germany (1889–1963). Böhlau, Cologne 2003 ISBN 3-412-02103-2 (also Diss. Phil. Mannheim 2002)
• Werner Schiele: At the front of freedom. Jakob Altmaier's Life for Democracy , City Council of Flörsheim, 1991
• Peter Pirker: Militant Exile. Anti-German resistance in Yugoslavia 1939–1940. in intermediate world. Zs. Der Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft , vol. 27, # 4, February 2011 ISSN  1606-4321 pp. 41-44
  • dsb .: Against the Third Reich! Sabotage and transnational resistance in Slovenia and Austria 1938–1940. Kitab, Klagenfurt 2010 ISBN 3-902585-65-X
• Jay Howard Geller: Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany 1945–1953. Cambridge UP 2004 ISBN 978-0-521-54126-8 ISBN 978-0-521-83353-0 In engl. Language (A. passim)

Web links

• Literature by and about Jakob Altmaier in the catalog of the German National Library
• Altmaier's estate in the archive of social democracy of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn)

notes

1. ^ ^{A b} Friauf, Annette: As a Jewish member of the first Bundestag. [1] accessed July 31, 2013
2. ↑ Becker: born 1898 in Pomerania - Reference: Pirker 2011, passim