Michael Niederkirchner

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Michael Niederkirchner (born September 5, 1882 in Budapest , † August 19, 1949 in Berlin ) was a German machinist and union official .

Life

The son of a stone mason from a family of German descent in Hungary attended elementary school from 1889 to 1893 and then worked in sand pits, quarries and wineries at the age of eleven. From 1896 to 1898 he did an apprenticeship as a machinist and then worked as an earthworker and construction worker until 1905, then as a pipelayer. He joined the trade union in 1900 and the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in 1903 . In 1904 he completed military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army . He then moved to Regensburg in 1905 and became a member of the SPD , later the USPD and then in 1920 the VKPD .

In 1906 he moved to Berlin, where he remained until 1920 operating steward was in the pipe laying industry. From 1914 he was branch manager of the pipe layer in the Berlin DMV . He took on this function until he was expelled from the free trade union in 1929.

In 1914 he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and in March 1915 was taken prisoner by the Russians. In 1917 he was one of the participants in the October Revolution in Russia. In April 1918 he took part in the First Congress of Foreign Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies in Moscow and became a member of the German section of the Communist Party of Russia (KPR) under the pseudonym "Josef Neumann".

In January 1919 he returned to Berlin, where from 1921 to 1930 he was managing director of the publishing house of the Red Union International (RGI). In 1926/27 he was a member of the KPD district leadership Berlin-Brandenburg-Lausitz, in 1927 he was elected to the Central Committee (ZK) of the KPD.

As early as 1928, Niederkirchner had become a protagonist of the strategy of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) within the KPD . Niederkirchner was a member of the Reich Committee of the RGO from 1929 to 1932. As early as March 14, 1929, the Central Committee of the KPD had decided to register party members who were excluded from the free trade unions due to the application of the RGO strategy. Michael Niederkirchner, who was excluded from the DMV in June 1929, founded an aid organization for those excluded, which became the nucleus of a "red association" of the RGO. From August 26 to October 30, 1929, Niederkirchner was the organizer of the "wild" Berlin pipelayer strike, which was carried out primarily by communists and radicalized unorganized people against the will of the Berlin local administration of the DMV and which ultimately failed.

In December 1929 he was appointed to the Central Council and the Executive Office of the RGI at its VII Congress in Moscow. From February to September 1930 he was Deputy Secretary General and Head of the RGI's Executive Office in Moscow; then he became a member of the International Committee of Metal Workers.

He was a participant of the KPD conference in the sports store Ziegenhals on February 7, 1933. Shortly after the Nazi takeover of power , he was arrested on February 28, 1933 and was in the Berlin-Spandau prison and in the Sonnenburg and Lichtenburg concentration camps until June 1934 . On June 13, 1934, he was expelled from Germany as an “annoying foreigner” and emigrated with his family to the Soviet Union , where he was again active as secretary of the Red Union International.

After returning from emigration in November 1945, he became a member of the first central committee of the KPD and a member of the zone management of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), co-founder in 1946 and, until his death, a member of the secretariat of the central board of IG Metall and a member of the federal board of the FDGB . He was also active in the organization VdN .

Michael Niederkirchner's urn was later buried in the memorial of the socialists (urn collecting grave by the large porphyry memorial plaque on the right side of the curtain wall) in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde central cemetery. His written estate is at the Foundation Archive of Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR (SAPMO) in the Federal Archives in Berlin.

family

Michael Niederkirchner had 5 children.

His son Paul was arrested by the Soviet secret service in 1939 and died in the Butyrka (prison in Moscow). His daughter Katja was shot in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 .

His granddaughter Käte Niederkirchner practiced as a pediatrician in Berlin and was a member of the People's Chamber of the GDR for 23 years ; As its vice-president, she helped prepare the unification agreement in 1990 .

Honors

The VEB Technical Building Equipment "Michael Niederkirchner" Berlin and some brigades of the metal trade were named after him, as were individual clubhouses in GDR locations and companies.

In March 1956 the trade union school in Rostock-Gehlsdorf was named after him.

literature

  • Niederkirchner, Michael . In: 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 .
  • Stefan Heinz : Michael Niederkirchner (1882–1949), In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (ed.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Emigrierte Metallgewerkschafter in the fight against the Nazi regime (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 3). Metropol, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-210-7 , pp. 216-236.
  • History of the German labor movement - Biographisches Lexikon , Dietz Verlag Berlin 1970.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Heinz: Moscow's mercenaries? The unified association of metal workers in Berlin. Development and failure of a communist union, Hamburg 2010, pp. 93ff., 113ff., 145ff., 430ff.
  2. ↑ See in detail Stefan Heinz: Michael Niederkirchner (1882–1949), In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (Ed.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Emigrierte Metallgewerkschafter in the fight against the Nazi regime (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration, Volume 3). Metropol, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-210-7 , p. 218 ff.
  3. ↑ http://www.etg-ziegenhals.de/Teilnehmer.html
  4. ↑ http://www.sozialistenfriedhof.de/54.html
  5. ^ Wiener Zeitung : I did not betray anyone ( memento of November 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive ), November 5, 1999
personal data
SURNAME Niederkirchner, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Josef Neumann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German metalworker and union founder
DATE OF BIRTH September 5, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 1949
Place of death Berlin