Max quail

This article deals with the German politician and trade unionist. For the Luftwaffe officer of the same name, see Max Wachtel (officer) .

Max Wachtel (born March 14, 1896 in Kiel , † October 15, 1963 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( USPD / KPD / SED ), resistance fighter and trade unionist . He was the first chairman of the central board of the wood industrial union in the FDGB .

Life

Wachtel, the son of an office worker, attended elementary school and then learned to be a carpenter . In the First World War he served as a soldier in the Navy from October 1914 . He was first employed as a carpenter at the Kiel shipyard , and later to clear mines in the Baltic Sea . In 1917 he joined the USPD. He was imprisoned twice for his oppositional stance. In November 1918, he was with the IV mine clearing flotilla off the Finnish coast near Helsinki . The crews formed a soldiers' council there , to which Wachtel was elected. With the Revolutionary People's Navy Division he came to Berlin at the end of 1918 and took part in the fighting there .

In 1919 Wachtel joined the German Woodworkers Association (DHV) and in 1920 the KPD. From 1920 to 1929 he worked as a member of the works council at General Motors GmbH in Berlin-Borsigwalde . In 1929 he was expelled from the DHV as a communist. Wachtel then worked full-time for the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO): Wachtel worked, among other things, as head of the Berlin-Brandenburg works council department, was chairman of the Berlin works council committee and deputy chairman of the initiative committee of the works councils in Germany. Wachtel was also a member of the close secretariat of the RGO Berlin-Brandenburg. He also worked as an instructor for the KPD district leadership in Berlin-Brandenburg.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, Wachtel continued to operate illegally. In the early elections on March 12, 1933, Wachtel was elected to the Berlin city council. Like all KPD members, his mandate was withdrawn before the first meeting by being expelled from the new assembly. Wachtel had also been arrested on March 10, 1933 and was only released from the Sonnenburg concentration camp in December 1933 . After that, Wachtel continued his illegal work. He was a member of the illegal district committee of the RGO Berlin and worked for the KPD in the Berlin-Wedding sub-district as head of a section management. Wachtel tried with others to recruit new members for forbidden groups and distributed the newspaper Der Rote Wedding . On June 16, 1936, he was arrested again in Berlin and sentenced to death on September 22, 1937 by the Second Senate of the “ People's Court ”. In the judgment it was said that Wachtel had "made on the Senate the impression of an unusually dogged and hateful communist who was stubbornly working towards the realization of the Bolshevik revolution". “With his ruthless willingness to work and his demagogic gift for speaking” he is “the right man to incite the workers and thus smash the national community again”. The defendant was also "according to the conviction of the Senate in his mind never to be changed". Wachtel was brought to the Berlin-Plötzensee prison. The death penalty was commuted to life in prison on April 12, 1938. Until his liberation on April 27, 1945, Wachtel remained imprisoned in the Brandenburg-Görden prison, where he worked in the carpentry shop.

In 1945 he rejoined the KPD and in 1946 became a member of the SED. In 1945/46, Wachtel headed the police station in Berlin-Charlottenburg . However, he was removed from office by the British military government, after which he was head of the Berlin-Mitte police station for six weeks .

Wachtel participated in the establishment of the FDGB in Greater Berlin and was secretary of the FDGB in June / July 1946. From July 1946 to June 1950 Wachtel acted as chairman of the central board of IG Holz and was a member of the FDGB federal board from 1947 to 1950.

From 1950 to 1952 Wachtel was general manager of HO Möbelhaus and then from 1952 to 1961 manager of various Berlin companies (VEB Expansion, VEB Pipeline Construction, VEB Vergaser, VEB Osthafenmühle). In 1961 he retired and became a member of the veterans' commission of the central board of IG Bau-Holz.

Max Wachtel died on October 15, 1963 in Berlin. His urn was buried in the Pergolenweg grave complex at the Socialist Memorial at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery.

Awards

• Fritz Heckert Medal
• Patriotic Order of Merit in Silver (1961)

literature

• Martin Broszat et al. (Ed.): SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany 1945–1949 . 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-55262-7 , p. 1049.
• Gabriele Baumgartner: Wachtel, Max . In: dies., Dieter Hebig (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ / DDR. 1945–1990 . Volume 2: Maassen - Zylla . KG Saur, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-598-11177-0 , p. 969.
• Hans-Joachim Fieber et al. (Ed.): Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime 1933 to 1945. A biographical lexicon. Volume 8 [T-Z]. Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89626-358-7 , p. 121.
• Christine Fischer-Defoy (Ed.): Put in front of the door. Berlin city councilors and members of the magistrate persecuted during National Socialism from 1933 to 1945 . Active Museum Association, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-018931-9 , p. 369.
• Quail, Max . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Andreas Herbst : Wachtel, Max. In: Dieter Dowe , Karlheinz Kuba, Manfred Wilke (Ed.): FDGB-Lexikon. Function, structure, cadre and development of a mass organization of the SED (1945–1990). Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86872-240-6 .