Josef Bergmann (trade unionist)

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Josef "Pepp" Bergmann (born October 4, 1913 in Berlin ; † February 18, 2005 in Hamburg ) was a German communist , trade unionist , resistance fighter against National Socialism and an active member of the KPD-O .

Life

Josef Bergmann was the sixth of eight children of Rabbi Judah Bergmann . Josef joined the communist youth organization early on and then joined the KPD-O in 1928 . His older brother Alfred Bergmann was particularly influential . Because of political activities, he and his younger brother Theodor Bergmann were expelled from school in 1929 and had to switch to the Kölln high school . He passed his Abitur there in 1931. In the same year he began studying medicine at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and was forcibly de-registered in 1933 after the NSDAP came to power .

After his brother Alfred was released from the concentration camp through contacts with his older brother Arthur, his father refused to allow Alfred to stay in his parents' apartment. This broke up the differences between Pepp and his father. He first went to Saarland , where he began an apprenticeship as a printer in Saarlouis and was active in the “border work” of his organization. In 1935 he returned to Berlin, where he continued his apprenticeship in Max Lichtwitz's company and played an important role in the underground work of the KPD opposition. During this time he lived with his uncle Willy Rosenzweig, a general practitioner. After he had already been temporarily detained by the Gestapo in 1937 , he emigrated via Paris after the Reichspogromnacht in January 1939 , where he a. a. August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler met, to Sweden , where he was active in Stockholm in the "National Group of German Trade Unionists in Sweden". There, together with his brother Theodor, he published Political Letters , in which the two articulated their ideas about a socialist-democratic post-war Germany.

After his return to Germany in April 1946 , he was denounced as a Comintern agent and interned by the British authorities among Nazi criminals and Wehrmacht soldiers in the Neuengamme internment camp . Only after pressure from British Labor MP Archibald Fenner Brockway and German-born KPD-O comrade Wolf Nelki was he released after just under six months. After his release from the camp, he lived in Hamburg and until his death worked actively and in a leading position in the workers' policy group , a successor organization to the KPD-O. He was a member of the KPD from 1946 until his expulsion in 1949. After five years as a primary school teacher , he worked as a printer again until his retirement in 1976. He was also an active member of the IG Druck und Papier / IG Medien . As the chairman of the works council in the printing works of the Großeinkaufs-Gesellschaft Deutscher Konsumgenossenschaften (GEG), he was dismissed without notice in 1959 and was "removed" from the premises by police force. He got involved a. a. in the peace movement , against Operation Allied Force against Yugoslavia, for the preservation of the Hafenstrasse and for the release of prisoners from the RAF .

He is buried together with his wife Herma in the honorary field of the Geschwister-Scholl-Foundation at the Hamburg cemetery Ohlsdorf .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karlen Vesper: The seventh child. Rabbi sons against Hitler. The odyssey of Theodor Bergmann and his brothers in new Germany on January 27, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Bergmann, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bergmann, Pepp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist, trade unionist and resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 2005
Place of death Hamburg