Max Frenzel (politician, 1891)

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Max Frenzel (born April 9, 1891 in Nuremberg ; died October 18, 1975 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein ) was a German politician ( KPD ) and trade unionist .

Life

The trained locksmith was the youngest of seven children in a working-class family. During the First World War he was drafted into military service in 1914 and, after being wounded, transferred to garrison service in Ludwigshafen in 1915. After his discharge from the army in 1916, he worked at the BASF plant there .

Frenzel joined the SPD and the trade union in 1909 . In 1917 he moved to the USPD . Having been in contact with the Spartakusbund since 1918 , Frenzel was one of the seven founders of the KPD local group in Ludwigshafen at the end of 1919. Frenzel was involved in setting up the KPD organization in the Palatinate. In 1920 he led the communist opposition in the German Metalworkers' Association in Ludwigshafen, the majority of whose leadership belonged to the USPD. In July 1922, Frenzel succeeded Hans Weber as district chairman of the KPD for the Palatinate. In March 1922 he was elected to the BASF workers' council along with other communists such as Fritz Baumgärtner . In November 1922, the chemical company fired Frenzel and two other communist works councils because they had taken part in a works council congress. A solidarity strike lasting several weeks against the layoffs without notice, which was extended from BASF to other factories in Ludwigshafen, was unsuccessful. From mid-1924 Frenzel worked as a full-time organ leader in the KPD district of Rhein-Saar (later reorganized into the Pfalz district). In December 1924 he was elected to the city council of Ludwigshafen, where he took over the chairmanship of the KPD parliamentary group. Frenzel belonged to a group of KPD functionaries who were expelled from the French occupying forces at the end of 1923 because of their fight against the Palatinate separatists . Temporarily active in the Saar area illegally , Frenzel was arrested in 1924 and sentenced to three months in prison.

Like many Communists from the Palatinate, Frenzel belonged to the ultra-left wing of the party and was a “prominent representative” of the Weddingen opposition . In January or February 1928, the KPD leadership under Ernst Thälmann excluded Frenzel from the party. In the Reichstag election in 1928 he was the top candidate of the Old Communist Party (AKP), an alliance of the Weddinger opposition and the Lenin League in the Palatinate constituency. With around 3,100 votes or 0.76 percent in the constituency, the AKP remained meaningless. In December 1929, Frenzel was re-elected to the Ludwigshafen City Council for the election proposal for the Left Opposition of the KPD , of which he was a member until 1933. Frenzel was a member of the Reich leadership of the United Left Opposition of the KPD - Bolshevik-Leninists (VLO), which emerged in April 1930 from the remnants of the Weddinger opposition and the Trotskyist minority in the Lenin League. Frenzel had been in correspondence with Trotsky since 1929 . When the VLO split up in 1931, he joined the minority around Kurt Landau , also known as the Funke group .

After his dismissal as a KPD functionary, Frenzel was unemployed for a long time before he returned to work as a locksmith. During the National Socialist era he was imprisoned three times for a short period of time.

After the liberation from National Socialism , Frenzel became a member of the KPD again, contrary to the guidelines of the party leadership, after he had made a declaration of loyalty. From April 1945 he was a member of the advisory board of the city of Ludwigshafen, a body appointed by the occupying power. From November 1945 to January 1949 he was second mayor of the city. In the KPD, Frenzel belonged to the Palatinate district leadership and the state leadership of Hesse-Palatinate from 1946. In February 1951 he was again expelled from the KPD. The reason was his refusal to publicly distance himself from Fritz Baumgärtner, who had recently been excluded. From 1949 to 1957 Frenzel worked as the secretary of IG Metall and was a member of the union's regional executive committee. In 1971 he was awarded the Ludwigshafen Ring of Honor.

Frenzel's son Waldemar (1926–1996) converted from the KPD to the SPD in 1956 and became involved as a trade unionist and local politician in Ludwigshafen. In 1979 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. The SPD member of the Bundestag Doris Barnett is a granddaughter of Max Frenzel.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Becker, KPD , p. 22.
  2. ↑ Dieter Schiffmann : From the revolution to the nine-hour day. Work and conflict at BASF 1918–1924. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-593-33183-7 , p. 429.
  3. ↑ Becker, KPD , p. 27.
  4. ↑ Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. An overall picture. Klartext, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3 , p. 541.
  5. ↑ Becker, KPD , p. 42; Bois, Communists , p. 491.
  6. ↑ Bois, Kommunisten , p. 311.
  7. ^ Oral information from Frenzel to Helmut Kohl on January 10, 1958; see Becker, KPD , p. 85.
  8. ↑ Becker, KPD , p. 179.
personal data
SURNAME Frenzel, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD) and trade unionist
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH 18th October 1975
Place of death Ludwigshafen am Rhein