Kurt Knüpfer

Kurt Knüpfer (born June 7, 1913 in Rippien , Saxony, † March 4, 2008 in Geseke , Westphalia) was a German politician of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

life and work

After elementary school , Knüpfer attended the technical training institutes in Dresden and learned the electrical trade.

In October 1927 he became a member of the Hitler Youth (HJ). In 1929 he took part in the Reich Party Congress of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in Nuremberg ; in 1930, at the age of 17, he became a member of the NSDAP.

From mid-1932 to January 1934 he was unemployed during the Great Depression and worked in his parents' hospitality and agriculture. As an enthusiastic member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) with sympathy for a “social revolution” , Knüpfer attended the SA leadership school in Königsbrück in autumn 1933 . According to his own statements, he was briefly imprisoned at Hohnstein Castle in the course of the so-called " Röhm Putsch " in 1934 . Nevertheless he made a career in the SA afterwards and became SA Sturmführer in 1935 . During this time he also resigned from the Evangelical Church.

From February 1934 to the spring of 1936 he worked as an electrician and then until he was called up for military service in February 1940, he was the operations manager at the Dresden- Coschütz electricity works. During the time of National Socialism , Knüpfer acted as a functionary of the “ German Labor Front ” (DAF).

His military service and imprisonment or stay in the Moosburg internment camp lasted until April 1946 . After his release from captivity, he did not return permanently to Dresden, but settled in Neuenhaus in the county of Bentheim on the Dutch border. From 1946 to 1951 Knüpfer worked in agriculture. From October 1951, Knüpfer worked as an electrical foreman in the emerging oil industry, in which many refugees and displaced persons found work. Since 1953, Knüpfer has been the works council chairman at the C. Deilmann GmbH oil company . Due to his social commitment, he enjoyed a certain popularity among the workforce and became a functionary of the mining industry union .

In the state elections of 1955 , Knüpfer ran in constituency 89 (Meppen) as the top candidate of the right-wing extremist German Reich Party (DRP), which achieved 3.2% of the votes, although it found hardly any voters in the large Emsland-Catholic part of the constituency, but many in the Protestant Niedergrafschaft Bentheim , a stronghold of this party at the state level. In 1957 Knüpfer acted as treasurer and head of organization in the DRP district board of Grafschaft Bentheim. He also ran for the DRP in 1961 local elections in Neuenhaus, but won no mandate. In 1964 he ran for the Grafschafter district election on the list of the "Lower Saxony Voters' Community" (NWG), to which remnants of the German Party (DP), the All-German Bloc / Federation of Expellees and Disenfranchised (GB / BHE) and the German Reich Party had come together and who received two mandates. He was elected to the Neuenhauser city council for the right-wing voter association.

Like many DRP voters and activists, Knüpfer went to the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), founded in 1964 , which was planned as a catchment basin for all right-wing and right-wing extremist parties and persons. Knüpfer was immediately active again in the district executive of this party and was even elected to the national executive at the founding party congress in Hanover. So he belonged to the party elite of the NPD. As a result, the high-ranking NPD functionary ran for the state parliament in 1967. Knüpfer came through the state list as a successor on August 28, 1967 in the 6th Lower Saxony State Parliament , to which he was a member until the end of the electoral period on June 20, 1970. The newly elected member of the district council has been involved in the board of the NPD state association of Lower Saxony since 1968, having previously resigned from the national board. Because of his many years of socio-political experience as chairman of the works council, the Grafschafter NPD flagship man advanced to chairman of the NPD federal committee for social policy and trade union issues.

Due to his increasing popularity as an NPD social politician - Knüpfer was the social policy spokesman for the Lower Saxony NPD parliamentary group - the IG Bergbau und Energie ousted him from all union functions and ultimately excluded him. Nevertheless, he was still elected as an independent works council chairman in his large company. Early attempts to poach the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), which were successful with some of his Grafschafter DRP party friends, were firmly rejected. In the 1970s, the workers 'representative leaned against the NPD-affiliated "German Workers' Association".

Until 1970 Knüpfer belonged to the council of the city of Neuenhaus for the NPD , then until 1972 to the Neuenhauser local council. With the decline of the NPD, his electoral chances dwindled. As a direct candidate for the NPD, Knüpfer only got 3.1% in the state elections of 1970 in Bentheimer Land. His renewed application in 1974 only achieved 0.9% of the valid votes. However, the social expert, who retired in 1978, came back to the Neuenhauser Council in 1981, but this time because of the NPD's lack of chances this time solely because of his personal reputation and as an independent applicant. In 1986 Knüpfer did not run again for reasons of age.

Kurt Knüpfer, who was becoming increasingly mentally and physically decrepit , lived since 1994 as a nursing home in a retirement home in Geseke- Eringerfeld , where he died in 2008. His urn was buried in Neuenhaus.

literature

• Grafschafter news. No. 93 of April 22, 1955.
• Reinhard Kühnl , Rainer Rilling , Christine Sager: The NPD. Structure, ideology and function of a neo-fascist party. 2nd revised edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1969, p. 36.
• Helmut Lensing: The political participation of the citizens - elections and parties in the county of Bentheim. In: Heinrich Voort (Ed.): 250 years of Bentheim - Hanover. The consequences of a pledge 1752–2002 (= Das Bentheimer Land 156). Published on behalf of the Grafschaft Bentheim district. Verlag Heimatverein der Grafschaft Bentheim, Nordhorn 2002, ISBN 3-922428-62-2 , pp. 127–266, here pp. 215–225.
• Helmut Lensing: Knüpfer, Kurt Max. In: Study Society for Emsland Regional History (Hrsg.): Emsländische Geschichte. Vol. 16, 2009, ISSN  0947-8582 , pp. 205-214.
• Lutz Niethammer : Adapted fascism. Political practice of the NPD. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1969, pp. 68, 177-178, 277.
• Barbara Simon : Member of Parliament in Lower Saxony 1946–1994. Biographical manual. Edited by the President of the Lower Saxony State Parliament. Lower Saxony State Parliament, Hanover 1996, p. 202.
• Horst W. Schmollinger: The National Democratic Party. In: Richard Stöss (Ed.): Party Handbook. The parties of the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1980 (= writings of the Central Institute for Social Science Research of the Free University of Berlin 39). Volume 2: NDP to WAV. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1984, ISBN 3-531-11592-8 , pp. 1925-1927, p. 1963.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Helmut Lensing: Knüpfer, Kurt Max. In: Study Society for Emsland Regional History (Hrsg.): Emsländische Geschichte. Vol. 16, 2009, ISSN  0947-8582 , pp. 205-207.