Max Herm

Max Herm (born December 11, 1899 in Brandenburg an der Havel ; † April 7, 1982 there ) was a German politician .

Life

He attended a community school in Brandenburg and was a trained electric motor fitter. In 1918 he became a member of the Spartakusbund. 1919 a member of the KPD . After he was arrested for political crimes in 1923, he succeeded in entering the city ​​council for the KPD on his return in 1926 . From 1926 he was also head of organization, from 1932 political director of the KPD sub-district of Brandenburg. In 1932 he became a member of the KPD district leadership Berlin-Brandenburg and head of the provincial department of the district leadership. In 1932 he was elected to the Reichstag .

On January 14, 1928, his son Günter Herm was born in his marriage to Minna Herm , called Mia .

After the Reichstag fire , Max Herm withdrew into illegality and went into hiding in Berlin. This step is all the more remarkable since his wife was not in Brandenburg at the time and the four-year-old son grew up without parents. His brother-in-law Siegfried Schulze , who was also active for the illegal KPD, looked after the son of the couple Herm together with his wife until the end of the war. In addition, until his arrest on March 20, 1933, he also took on the transport of mail to and from Max Herm. Among other things, he forwarded the election announcements and the associated question of accepting the mandate after the elections to the Reichstag, city council and state parliament in March 1933 to the top functionary of the KPD, who was now illegally, and took care of the dispatch of the answers and made sure that Max Herm stayed up to date on the events in Brandenburg / Havel.

In April 1933, Max Herm was arrested by the National Socialists . He spent the following years in various concentration camps such as Sonnenburg , Lichtenburg and Buchenwald . He was again at large from 1939 to 1944 under the supervision of the Gestapo until he was arrested again in 1944 and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . His wife Minna Herm was also persecuted by the Nazis over the entire period of National Socialism and arrested several times.

After the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had been liberated, he became mayor of Brandenburg an der Havel in May 1945 . However, in the same year he was sent to the Central Administration for Labor and Social Welfare in Berlin and could no longer carry out this office. In 1945 he also became a member of the KPD district leadership in Brandenburg. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as the head of the Labor and Social Welfare Department of the Central Secretariat of the SED Party Executive and the Central Committee of the SED . In 1952 he came back to his hometown because he had to become labor director of the local steel and rolling mill. He carried out this task until 1957, the year in which his second term as mayor began, which lasted until 1965.

Honors

Max Herm is an honorary citizen of the city of Brandenburg an der Havel, which also named a street after him. For his achievements he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1955, 1964 and 1970 , the Karl Marx Order in 1974 and the Gold Medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1979. A school was named after him.

literature

• Günter Pätzold: Fighter in his class. Memories from the life and struggle of Comrade Max Herm and his closest comrades in arms. Potsdam 1974.
• Wolfgang Kusior: Worker functionary, antifascist, Lord Mayor - in memory of Max Herm . In: Kulturbund der DDR, Gesellschaft für Heimatgeschichte, Potsdam District Board (ed.): Märkische Heimat (=  contributions to the local history of the Potsdam district ). Issue 8. Potsdam 1989, p. 15-38 .
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. Dietz, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-320-02044-7 , pp. 302-303.
• Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst: German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 , p. 363.
• Andreas Herbst:  Herm, Max . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

• Max Herm in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Günter Herm. In: sonderausstellung.stadtmuseum-brandenburg.de. City of Brandenburg an der Havel, The Lord Mayor, Department III - Culture, Department 41 - Museum, accessed on March 8, 2020 .