Jakob Ritter

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Jakob Ritter

Jakob Ritter (born June 26, 1886 in Mannheim ; † October 11, 1951 there ) was a communist politician and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

The knight, who came from a working-class family, learned the trade of Hechler and joined the workers' youth movement and in 1905 the SPD . After three years as a foreman in Dresden, when he returned to Mannheim, he resigned this position in 1911 and looked for a position in the metal industry, since he had developed the view that a commanding position was incompatible with a socialist attitude.

After a brief deployment as a soldier, Ritter joined the USPD in 1917 and belonged to the left wing there, which merged with the KPD in 1920 . In 1921 he was elected for the KPD in the state parliament of Baden , and from the Jena party congress in the same year he was also a member of the central committee of the KPD. Belonging to the left wing of the party around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow , he was also head of organization of the KPD in Baden from 1924 and was re-elected to the state parliament in 1925. After Fischer and Maslow was deposed from the party leadership in 1925, the left wing in Baden under Ritter and Georg Kenzler was initially able to assert itself against the Thälmann leadership at the national level; in March 1927, however, Ritter was also relieved of his functions, and expelled from the party in July of the same year. Retaining his mandate until the end of the legislative period in 1929, Ritter joined the Lenin League in 1928 after its founding , of which he headed the regional association in Baden, and in 1932 he joined the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

After the NSDAP came to power in 1933, Ritter was still active in the SAPD, which had been working illegally since the Reichstag fire , which had around 100 members in Mannheim and was able to keep its structures intact until 1938 due to strict adherence to conspiratorial principles. Meetings of the party took place a. also took place in Ritter's garden house. Ritter himself, who was relatively known to the public and therefore the prosecution authorities, unlike most party members, however, was arrested in 1934 and two and a half years prison sentenced and then to 1942 in the Dachau concentration camp held. He was then transferred to Bruchsal penitentiary , where a prison guard known to him, who used to belong to the Center Party , was able to obtain the release from prison of the badly ill knight. After his release from the concentration camp, Ritter was subject to daily reporting. When he was threatened with arrest again in the summer of 1944 as part of the “ Aktion Gewitter ”, he went into hiding in Bingen until he was liberated in 1945.

After the end of the war, Ritter was re-accepted into the KPD, took over the function of organizational manager in Baden and was elected to the state parliament of Württemberg-Baden in November 1946 . Since Ritter stuck to his anti-Stalinist views, he came into conflict with his party again and resigned from the state parliament and party function in August 1947, but remained a member of the KPD. 1948 Assistant Secretary selected the city of Mannheim, died Knight after a long illness on 11 October 1951st

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