Matthäus Herrmann

Bronze plaque by Matthäus Herrmann

Matthäus Herrmann (born June 8, 1879 in Warmensteinach ; † September 29, 1959 there ) was a German SPD politician and trade unionist .

Life

Herrmann was a train driver and an official of the Union of Railway Workers, a union of railway workers. From 1903 to 1905 he was a member of the board of directors of the Association for Bavarian Railway Workshops and Operational Workers, which later became the Association of Southern German Railway Workers in Nuremberg. In 1907 he was a co-founder of the railway construction cooperative Nürnberg-Rangierbahnhof and also played a key role in the establishment of the Nuremberg marshalling yard . From 1905 to 1933 Herrmann was second chairman of the main board of the South German Railway Union and its successor organizations. From 1914 to 1918 he was a soldier in the First World War and at the end of the war he was a member of a soldiers' council . From 1919 Herrmann was a functionary and board member in the German Railway Union and from 1925 in the Union of Railway Workers in Germany . He took on numerous functions for the association, including becoming chairman of the free trade union organization on March 29, 1933 - shortly before it was banned. From 1919 to 1928 he was a member of the Bavarian State Parliament in the 10th to 13th legislative period . He was then until the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933 member of the board of directors of the Reichsbahngesellschaft and the committee of the labor office of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva .

From May to December 1933 Herrmann was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp , among other places . He is said to have been active in resistance circles. He was imprisoned again from August 1944 until the end of the war, initially suspected of complicity in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , but acquitted by the People's Court on January 13, 1945 for lack of evidence.

After the Second World War , Herrmann was again a member of the Bavarian state parliament from 1946 to 1949 , where he was first vice-president of the appointed state parliament in 1946. In addition, he was also chairman of the administrative board of the German civil service insurance and from 1947 until his death chairman of the supervisory board of the local glass works. From 1949 to 1957 he was the third chairman of the German Railway Workers Union . Herrmann was a member of the German Bundestag in its first legislative period (1949-1953) as a directly elected member of the Bayreuth constituency .

literature

• Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz : Railway trade unionists in the Nazi state. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration (1933–1945) (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 7). Metropol, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-353-1 .

Web links

• Short biography of the German Resistance Memorial Center