Maria Schmidt (trade unionist)

Maria Schmidt (born January 8, 1903 in Hörde ; died February 21, 1988 in Bielefeld ) was a German trade unionist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Maria Schmidt's father was a member of the SPD and, during the Weimar Republic , a member of the works council at the Phoenix steelworks in Hörde. Schmidt attended the commercial school in Dortmund after elementary school and at the age of 15 took up a position as a typist in the administration of the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV) in Dortmund. In 1922 she changed jobs and went to the Deutscher Werkmeister-Verband (DWV), and from 1923 she worked in its administrative center in Bielefeld . Schmidt became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) in 1919 and the SPD in 1921. In 1923 she became one of the few leaders of an SAJ district in the Reich and became a member of the East Westphalia-Lippe district board of the Young Socialists .

From 1928 she was a member of the women's committee of the Central Association of Employees . In the DWV, she moved up to the position of deputy chairman of the Bielefeld local association, and she acquired the necessary knowledge in adult education courses and at trade union seminars . After the handover of power to the National Socialists , she was dismissed for political reasons when the employee unions were brought into line on May 16, 1933.

Schmidt was unemployed for two years and from 1935 worked as a stenographer for Nordstern Insurance in Dortmund.

In Dortmund she worked with other former SAJ members in a resistance cell supported by Emil Groß , who had gone into exile in Holland . Schmidt had met the SAJ functionary Groß in Bielefeld in 1922. She traveled several times to conspiratorial meetings in Amsterdam in order to provide the emigrated resistance members with information, in the Dortmund area she tried to win informants for the resistance and supporters for the distribution of the infiltrated weekly newspaper Freie Presse and spoke to Fritz Henßler and Heinrich Pieper , the but based on the assessment of the Sopade in Prague. As the success of the Gestapo's search increased, the activities of the resistance group around Schmidt and Groß subsided.

In March 1936 Schmidt was arrested in Dortmund and charged with two men from the group before the Hamm Higher Regional Court for "high treason under aggravating circumstances". On May 2, 1937 she was four years and six months prison convicted. After serving his sentence, Schmidt was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on September 28, 1940 and was imprisoned for another four years. Seriously ill, she was freed on April 28, 1945 by soldiers of the Soviet troops .

Schmidt married Emil Groß, who was a newspaper publisher in the Federal Republic of Germany, in Bielefeld in 1947. He died in 1967. Schmidt was no longer able to resume his professional career. She worked on a voluntary basis in the care of social democratic victims of the Nazi regime and supported them in asserting claims for reparation . Schmidt fought her own redress proceedings against the state of North Rhine-Westphalia up to the Federal Court of Justice . Schmidt's union activity was classified by the court as subordinate employee activity, her personal career goal of becoming a women's officer on a union executive, which had now been nullified by the consequences of imprisonment, was not recognized. Furthermore, in 1971 the compensation chamber of the Detmold Regional Court ruled that she was only to be granted compensation until the time of her marriage in 1947, since after that she was considered to be a wife cared for by her husband . Your appeal was rejected by the Hamm Higher Regional Court . Your lawsuit against the non-admission of an appeal was ultimately rejected in 1973 by the Federal Court of Justice (BGH). This established the case law that women lost their right to a compensation pension when they marry. The legal situation began to change from 1976 with the reform of marriage and family law .

literature

• Anke Fromme: Schmidt, Maria (1903–1988): Socialist trade unionist in active resistance . In: Siegfried Mielke (ed.): Trade unionists in the Nazi state: persecution, resistance, emigration . Essen: Klartext, 2008, ISBN 978-3-89861-914-1 , pp. 277–285
• Gross, Emil , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 . Volume 1, Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 243f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Leonore Ansorg: S. Mielke: trade unionists in the Nazi state , review, at H-Soz-Kult , December 17, 2008