Karl Raloff

Karl Raloff

Karl Raloff (born June 4, 1899 in Altona , †  September 22, 1976 in Lübeck-Travemünde ) (pseudonym Karl Ehrlich) was a German politician ( SPD ).

Live and act

Life in the Empire (1899 to 1919)

Raloff was born in the Altona district of Ottensen in 1899 as the son of the worker Heinrich Raloff . Besides him, the parents had five other sons: Heinrich, Friedrich, Max, Georg and Gottlieb Raloff. Family life was strongly influenced by the social democratic engagement of the parents. Following on from this, Raloff was already active as a teenager in the socialist youth movement. He also became a member of the Fichte workers' sports club in Eimsbüttel .

Raloff attended elementary school in Hamburg, which he left as the best in his class. In March 1914 he began an apprenticeship as clerk in the law office of an SPD member in Altona. At the same time he attended the commercial training school. In November 1915, Raloff found a job at the Buchbinder local health insurance fund in Hamburg.

From 1917 Raloff took part in the First World War as a soldier on the Eastern and Western Fronts. In the same year Raloff joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). After the November Revolution of 1918 Raloff was a member of a workers 'and soldiers' council .

Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933)

After leaving school, Raloff was involved in the socialist youth movement and was from 1916 - as chairman of the "Eimsbüttel I department" - on its Hamburg board. During this time he also attended public lectures at the Hamburg Colonial Institute, the forerunner of the University of the Hanseatic City. In addition, he joined the Central Association of Employees.

In May 1919 Raloff began his career as an editor for the social democratic press. In the following years he wrote for SPD newspapers in Neubrandenburg, where he wrote for the will of the people , and in the Rhineland, where he wrote for the Trier People's Guard (1920) and the Nahetal-Boten in Oberstein-Idar (1922).

From August 28th to 30th, 1920 Raloff took part in the first Reich Conference of Young Workers in Weimar. There he met Erich Ollenhauer , Karl Höltermann , Walter Kolb , Franz Osterroth and Emil R. Müller , who became his close political companions in the years and decades that followed. In 1925 Raloff Müller's daughter Grete married. In 1921/22 Raloff traveled to Denmark to take part in a winter course at the International Elementary School in Helsingör. There he formed friendly relations with several young Danish Social Democrats, which ten years later, when he came to Denmark as an emigrant, proved to be of vital importance. Among the friends Raloff made at this time were Hans Hedtoft .

On November 1, 1922, Karl Raloff became the responsible political editor for the Volksstimme in Saarbrücken. Two days after the publication of the emergency ordinance to maintain order and security in the Saar area on March 11, 1923, he was expelled from the Saar area by the French government commission. He now moved to Hanover, where he joined the editorial office of the people's will there. On July 1, 1923, he became the second local editor, and in 1928 he was the responsible political editor of the newspaper. A year later, in 1924, Raloff founded the branch of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold in Hanover, which he also chaired. In addition, he became deputy district chairman of the Reich Banner in the province of Hanover. In 1925 he was elected to the executive committee of the Hanoverian SPD, to which he belonged until 1933. At the same time he took over the chairmanship of the local education committee of his party.

In 1928 Raloff narrowly missed entry into various parliaments twice: In May he failed in the constituency of southern Hanover with his candidacy for a place in the Prussian state parliament and in September he missed entry into the Reichstag as an SPD candidate in the constituency of southern Hanover-Braunschweig.

In July 1932 Raloff was elected to the Reichstag as a candidate of the SPD for constituency 16 (Südhannover-Braunschweig) , to which he was a member until June 1933. In the SPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag, Raloff was seen as a supporter of Kurt Schumacher and Carlo Mierendorff .

In 1932 Raloff became chairman of the local section of the Iron Front .

Period of National Socialism (1933 to 1945)

In March 1933 Raloff took part in the vote on the Enabling Act , which together with the Reichstag Fire Ordinance of February 1933, formed the basis for the establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship. Raloff was one of only 94 MPs who voted against the law, which was passed by a majority of 444 votes.

Immediately after this vote, he first had to go into hiding in Germany.

As an emigrant in Denmark (1933 to 1940)

In August 1933, on the advice of people he trusted in the political police in Hanover, Raloff was told that he was still threatened. His friend Willy Jesse helped him escape to Denmark at the end of the month, where he settled in Copenhagen. His family followed him there in December of the same year.

In Copenhagen, Raloff was initially given material support by the Matteotti Committee and the Danish Trade Union of Commercial and Office Workers.

From May 1936 to April 1940 Raloff worked as an archivist in the Arbejderbevägelsens bibliotek og arkiv (ABA). As an archivist, he was there on behalf of the SPD abroad ( Sopade ) to sort through and organize the parts of the former SPD archive in Berlin that had come to Copenhagen. In 1938 he handed this over to the Amsterdam International Institute for Social History . As an employee of the SPD press, Raloff also took part in the editing of the Germany reports .

On behalf of the Social Democratic Party of Denmark, he wrote two pamphlets against National Socialism. On the one hand, Fra Ebert til Hitler ( From Ebert to Hitler ) published in 1933 , later To års Nazistyre ( Two Years of Nazi Regime ), an inventory of the first two years of Nazi rule published in 1935. In order to protect his relatives who remained in Germany from reprisals, Raloff had both works published under the pseudonym Karl Ehrlich.

In 1937 the book Kamp uden våben ( Fight Without Arms ) came on the market, which Raloff - again under the pseudonym Karl Ehrlich - had written together with the Danes Niels Lendberg and Gammelgård Jacobsen and which was published by the renowned publisher Levin & Munksgård. Raloff contributed a chapter to this volume on the Ruhrkampf of 1923 and on the Kapp Putsch of 1920. In addition, Raloff wrote numerous articles for social democratic newspapers at this time, especially for the main organ of the Danish social democrats, Social-Demokrats . Further articles appeared in the monthly Socialisten and in trade union papers such as Arbejderen .

As an anonymous “German political refugee”, Raloff gave a long series of lectures in the 1930s on the situation in National Socialist Germany. Some observers suggested that Raloff's "functionary style" and the impression of being a "rigid ideologue" that he created were not always conducive to the success of his attempts at influence.

In 1938 Raloff was expatriated from Germany. From then on he was stateless.

In the spring of 1940 Raloff finished his last book published in Denmark, the Festschrift Lager - og Pakhusarbejdernes gennem 50 år , which was created as part of his archival work , in which he described the history of the Danish warehouse workers' movement.

As an emigrant in Sweden (1940 to 1945)

In April 1940, after the German invasion of Denmark , Raloff fled to Sweden with Henry Prien , Fritz Tarnow and Hans Reinowski . The four reached the Swedish coast on April 16 in a small rowboat.

In Sweden Raloff was interned as a refugee in Loka Brunn in central Sweden until June , where he became spokesman for the social democratic camp committee. He then came to Kinna in West Gotland, where he earned his living as a language teacher for the local workers' education committee and as a clerk for a stationery wholesaler.

From 1942 to 1944 he lived on Öland. In August 1943 he received a residence permit for all of Sweden, so that from then on he could move around freely. He visited the Swedish capital Stockholm for the first time in the autumn of 1943. At this time he also resumed his avid journalistic activities from earlier years.

Raloff also followed the development of the international group of democratic socialists in Sweden as a critical commentator. He was also in close correspondence with various leading social democrats such as his friend Erich Ollenhauer.

On December 2nd and 3rd, 1944, he took part in the 1st national conference of the German Social Democrats in Sweden, where he gave the main political talk under the title "The coming Germany and building peace".

Life in Denmark (1945 to 1965)

Raloff returned to Denmark in October 1945. There he was reunited with his family after five and a half years of separation. In the next two years he devoted himself to looking after refugees from the former German eastern regions. In 1946 he took over the management of the cultural department of the Kløvermarken refugee camp .

After returning from a trip to Germany in 1946, Raloff turned down the offer to become editor and licentiate of the Frankfurter Rundschau . He justified this decision with his rejection of the community newspaper system. A year later, in 1947, Raloff became the representative of the German Press Agency in Copenhagen. For the next four years he reported as a correspondent from the Danish capital. Conversely, he kept the Danes informed about the latest developments in Germany in reports for Danish newspapers.

From January 1, 1947, Raloff was Hans Reinowski's successor in the editorial team of Deutsche Nachrichten , a newspaper written and edited by Germans. This newspaper, which emerged from an illegal exile newspaper, was financed by the Danish government and last had a circulation of over 20,000 copies. Raloff visited Norway for the first time in June 1949.

After the establishment of the German legation in Denmark in 1951, Raloff was taken over as attaché to the staff of the legation. On June 18, 1951, he was granted German citizenship again. The naturalization certificate was signed by the district president in Hanover. When the German consulate general in Copenhagen was upgraded to an embassy in January 1952 , Raloff received the post of press attaché. In addition to his work in the consulate, Raloff again traveled to the country to give lectures to the population, to whom he tried to explain the problems of the new Germany. He was also a member of the board of directors of the Association of Foreign Press and the German-Danish Society . When he retired on July 1, 1965, it received a lively response in the Danish press.

Final years (1965 to 1976)

After his retirement in 1965, Raloff kept his residence in Copenhagen. He died in 1977 during a spa stay in Travemünde.

Today a plaque on the building of the German embassy in Denmark commemorates him.

Raloff's estate was handed over to the Archive of Social Democracy (AdsD) by his widow in the late 1970s. It includes material from the years 1913 to 1977 and has a volume of 1.7 linear meters of shelf. In terms of content, it contains biographical and personal documents, correspondence and manuscripts for publications by the estate. There are also sample copies of the brochures he has written and a collection of newspaper and magazine articles.

Fonts

• Fra Ebert til Hitler , Copenhagen 1933.
• 2 aars nazistyre , Copenhagen 1935.
• Kamp uden vaaben , Copenhagen 1937.
• Et bevaeget liv , Copenhagen 1969.
• An eventful life. From the Empire to the Federal Republic. Introduced and commented by Herbert and Sibylle Obenaus , Hanover 1995. (Autobiography; published posthumously)

literature

• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
• Gerd Callesen: Karl Raloff (1899-1976) . In: Preserve, Spread, Educate. Archivists, librarians and collectors of the sources of the German-speaking labor movement . Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 2009, pp. 254–257 ISBN 978-3-86872-105-8 online (pdf; 273 kB)
• Willy Dähnhardt ; Birgit S. Nielsen [Ed.]: Exile in Denmark: German-speaking scientists, artists and writers in Danish exile after 1933 , Heide: Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens, 1993 ISBN 3-8042-0569-0

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Raloff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Karl Raloff in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Karl Raloff in FES

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl-Georg-Mix: German Refugees in Denmark 1945-1949 , 2005, p. 195.
2. ↑ Beatrix Herlemann / Helga Schatz: Biographical Lexicon of Lower Saxony Parliamentarians, 1919-1945 , 2004, p. 285.