Karl Wastl

Karl Wastl (born January 26, 1889 in Dorfen , district of Erding , † March 7, 1963 in Löhnhorst ) was a German politician ( KPD ) and trade unionist . He was a member of the Oldenburg State Parliament .

Life

Wastl, son of master brewer Pius Wastl and Maria Wastl, née Hilger, learned the trade of coppersmith after finishing primary school . In 1908 he joined the SPD and the Coppersmiths Association. In August 1914 he was called up for military service and seriously wounded in 1915. From 1919 he worked as a coppersmith at the Bremer Vulkanwerft in Vegesack . At the shipyard he was elected shop steward and works council. From 1920 Wastl was first cashier, then chairman of the coppersmiths association in Vegesack.

In 1918 Wastl joined the USPD , and at the end of 1920 he became a member of the KPD. Wastl was involved in the preparation of the " German October " in Bremen. On the night of October 22nd to 23rd, 1923 there was an uprising in Hamburg , Vegesack and Blumenthal . On the morning of October 23, under the leadership of Wastl, the volcano shipyard and wool combing department were occupied and work stopped there. However, the uprising was put down by security police the following day. Wastl had to go into hiding. Wastl was on the run between 1923 and 1926 because of the "formation of proletarian hundreds " by the police across the empire. Wastl is said to have stayed in the Soviet Union during this time and also took part in military courses there. When at the end of 1925 the proceedings against him were discontinued due to an amnesty , he returned to Bremen in January 1926. Wastl was first head of the communist bookshop, then subdistrict head of the KPD in Aumund and then until May 1929 was Gauleiter of the Red Front Fighters' Union (RFB) in Bremen. Since 1926, Wastl was also active as a councilor in Aumund as well as in the district council and district committee of the Blumenthal district . Between 1928 and 1931 Wastl was unemployed because he had been put on a " black list ".

In July 1931 Wastl moved to Oldenburg and became a full-time KPD secretary there. Wastl was nominated as the top candidate of the KPD for the state elections on May 29, 1932 and was elected to the state parliament. In the elections, the NSDAP obtained an absolute majority of the seats and, in Carl Röver , was able to appoint the first Prime Minister of a National Socialist state government. In the second session of the state parliament on July 1, 1932, Wastl protested against the fact that the NSDAP parliamentary group wanted to prevent a debate on the government declaration. Wastl was withdrawn from the floor by the president of the state parliament and expelled from the state parliament for three sessions. After the labor administration committed unemployed people from Oldenburg and the surrounding area to emergency work on the lower Hunte in August 1932, the emergency workers went on strike, as they were paid less wages for their work than before. Wastl, who had been a member of the strike leadership, tried in vain to address the strike, which ended with partial success in September, in the state parliament and in protest on September 27, 1932, resigned his state parliament mandate and returned to Aumund.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Wastl was arrested by the Gestapo on April 2, 1933 and was in so-called " protective custody " from April to December 22, 1933 , first in the Blumenthal remand prison , then from August in the Esterwegen concentration camp (Camp III) . After his release, Wastl moved with his family to relatives in Hermannsburg . On January 1, 1936, he joined the German Labor Front in order to do opposition work on behalf of the KPD until August 1939. On September 1, 1939, Wastl was arrested again as a former KPD functionary and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Wastl took part in the “Rote Kuhle” solidarity campaign, an aid campaign by the illegal camp management for the benefit of starving Soviet prisoners of war . Together with 149 other prisoners who were suspected of the resistance, Wastl was locked in an isolation barracks on August 11, 1944. Two months later, on October 11, 1944, 27 of these prisoners - mostly Communists - were shot, the others - including Wastl - were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp . There Wastl was liberated by American troops on May 5, 1945.

After his liberation, Wastl returned to Bremen, where he helped build the unions. On November 1, 1945 he became secretary of IG Metall in Bremen-Nord . Wastl also rejoined the KPD, but came increasingly at odds with the party leadership due to the party purges and the KPD's isolationist course. In 1948 he therefore resigned from the KPD. During the Bremen shipyard workers' strike in 1953, there were sharp clashes between the KPD on the one hand and union officials - Wastl among them - on the other. In November 1954, Wastl resigned from the position of trade union secretary of IG Metall in Vegesack for reasons of age.

literature

• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdL The end of the parliaments in 1933 and the members of the state parliaments and citizenships of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation 1933–1945 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-77005-189-0 , p. 170.
• Wastl, Karl . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Philipp Vergin: Karl Wastl (1889–1963): coppersmith, communist, anti-fascist and union secretary in Vegesack. A biographical summary . In: Labor Movement and Social History. Journal for the regional history of Bremen in the 19th and 20th centuries . Vol. 26 (2012), pp. 115-136.
• Philipp Vergin: We remember Karl Wastl - an active trade unionist and anti-fascist . In: Wir Älteren in the trade unions in Bremen and Bremerhaven , No. 18 (2012) (PDF; 1.1 MB), pp. 19-21.
• Philipp Vergin: Karl Wastl (1889–1963) . In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Biographical Handbook , Volume 4 (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration , Vol. 6). Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-148-3 , pp. 250-270.

Web links

• Florian Tempel: Communist and resistance fighter . Article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung from November 17, 2015 (with photo).