Jakob Steffan

Jakob Steffan at the Rittersturz Conference 1948 (left: Louise Schroeder )

Jakob Steffan (born December 31, 1888 in Oppenheim ; † February 9, 1957 in Mainz ) was a German social democratic politician who was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp from 1933 onwards. From 1940 he organized the civil anti-Nazi resistance in southern and Rhine Hesse for Wilhelm Leuschner . From 1946 to 1950 he was Minister of the Interior and Social Affairs in Rhineland-Palatinate .

Life

Steffan was born as the son of the worker Jakob Steffan and his wife Caroline, b. Ziemer, born. After elementary school and commercial apprenticeship in Oppenheim, he worked as a paralegal and in the Brockhues chemical works in Niederwalluf.

From 1914 to 1918 Steffan took part in the First World War as a member of the 1st Nassau Field Artillery Regiment No. 27 Orange and was decorated several times because of his bravery. He then became a commercial clerk, then an authorized signatory and, in 1928, finally a partner in the Nödling distillery in Oppenheim. In 1923 he was responsible for repelling the Rhenish separatists . On April 28, 1928, he married Eleonore Leist in Darmstadt. She was the niece of Ludwig Schwamb , who had been friends with him since 1919, and who was also appointed personal advisor to the Hessian Interior Minister Wilhelm Leuschner in 1928.

Steffan joined the SPD in 1912 and worked from 1919 to 1933 in Oppenheim as a city councilor and a member of the district council. He served the Rheinhessen Provincial Committee between 1923 and 1929. From 1923 to 1933 he was also a member of the Provincial Parliament of the Rheinhessen Province . From 1927 to 1933 he was also a member of the People's State of Hesse and from July to November 1932 also a member of the Reichstag for constituency 33 Hessen-Darmstadt.

From March 31, 1933, he was initially imprisoned in Frankfurt am Main , Darmstadt and Mainz for political reasons . His house in Oppenheim was evicted, his furniture and valuables were relocated and then auctioned. On instructions from the SA , Steffan's wife and son Lothar had to leave Oppenheim. They found refuge with their mother Emilie Leist, who from then on took care of the upbringing of the grandson together with her brother Ludwig Schwamb. Steffan's license as an independent spirits trader in Mainz was also withdrawn and his stock of goods confiscated.

On December 15, 1933, in a trial with a clearly political background, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for allegedly infidelity and damage to the General Local Health Insurance Fund in Oppenheim, of which he was previously chairman. He served the sentence in the Butzbach detention center .

Since January 25, 1936, Steffan was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp under constant humiliation and mistreatment. Because of the reopening of the proceedings, he was transferred to the Mainz court prison several times in 1937 and 1938. The first sentence was overturned, but on July 28, 1939 there was a new sentence to a prison sentence of the same amount, now for fraud and breach of trust. Shortly after the war, the criminal chamber of the Mainz regional court (business number 3 K Ms 7a - b / 45) established his innocence beyond doubt in a retrial and overturned the previous judgment.

On April 20, 1940, he was released from the Dachau concentration camp on a trial basis. His wife had divorced in 1938. He could not go back to his mother, because the Oppenheim city administration asked him to leave the city within two hours because of his political past. Thereupon he took a furnished room in Mainz. He was denied permission to re-produce brandy, and he was placed under police supervision.

Shortly after his release from prison, he was recruited to become a leader in a nationwide anti-Nazi network of primarily social-democratic and trade union shop stewards. This conspiratorial structure was particularly closely linked by Leuschner, Schwamb, Carlo Mierendorff and others in the area between Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden , Mainz and Heidelberg . For camouflage reasons, Steffan became a partner in a small pharmaceutical company. It belonged to Prof. Franz Como in Bensheim , who was also involved in those resistance activities. After he had inclined to three officials of the Mainz Gestapo , Steffan was able to warn several people persecuted for racist, political or religious reasons of the imminent arrest. He was briefly imprisoned on August 22, 1944 during the nationwide search after the failed coup attempt on July 20, 1944 . He has not disclosed his knowledge of the civil resistance structures in Wehrkreis XII Wiesbaden. Until the end of the Nazi dictatorship he was able to stay hidden in Spiesheim in the Rhine-Hesse region .

In March 1945 Steffan was appointed provisional police president for Rheinhessen in Mainz and in May he was appointed regional president for Rheinhessen. In 1946 he became a member of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Advisory Assembly . In 1947 Steffan was elected to the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament, to which he was a member until 1951. In 1946 and 1947 he served the provisional state government as Minister of the Interior . From 1947 to 1949 he worked in the same function in the cabinet of Prime Minister Peter Altmeier and finally from 1949 to 1950 as Minister of Social Affairs.

From 1946 to 1956 he was a member of the central control commission of the SPD as well as its state committee for Rhineland-Palatinate and the district committee for Rheinhessen.

Honors

Jakob Steffan was an honorary senator of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and an honorary citizen of the city of Oppenheim. Since 2010, the Jakob Steffan Prize against right-wing extremism and for a strong democracy has been awarded by the association “Rheinhessen gegen Rechts e. V. “awarded.

See also

Cabinet Floor I - Cabinet Altmeier I

literature

• Martin Steffan . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Volume 1: Deceased Personalities. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. GmbH, Hanover 1960, p. 300.
• Martin Schumacher (Ed.): M. d. R. The members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation 1933–1945. A biographical documentation. 3. Edition. Düsseldorf 1994.
• Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1867-1933. Biographies, chronicles, election documentation. A handbook (= handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 7). Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-5192-0 .
• Board of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (ed.): Committed to freedom. Memorial book of the German social democracy in the 20th century. Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2000, ISBN 3-89472-173-1 .
• Axel Ulrich: Political resistance against the "Third Reich" in the Rhine-Main area. 3. Edition. Thrun-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-9809513-2-6 .
• Axel Ulrich: Ludwig Schwamb, Jakob Steffan and other southwest German comrades-in-arms of Wilhelm Leuschner in the anti-Nazi resistance. In: Niersteiner history sheets. Volume 12, 2006, pp. 21-50.
• Axel Ulrich: Wilhelm Leuschner - a German resistance fighter. For freedom and justice, democratic unity and a social republic. Thrun-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2012, ISBN 978-3-9809513-9-5 .
• Sina Schiffel: Jakob Steffan - A contentious democrat. Deputy, concentration camp prisoner, interior minister. Ed .: State Center for Political Education Rhineland-Palatinate. Mainz, Osthofen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89289-019-5 .
• Ludger Fittkau / Marie-Christine Werner: Die Konspirateure. The civil resistance behind July 20, 1944 , wbg Theiss, Darmstadt 2019, ISBN 978-3-8062-3893-8 .

Web links

Commons : Jakob Steffan  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Jakob Steffan Prize against right-wing extremism and for a strong democracy
• Jakob Steffan in the database of members of the Reichstag