Nikolaus Bernhard

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Nikolaus Bernhard

Nikolaus Bernhard (born April 3, 1881 in Bühl, today's municipality of Bibertal , † August 19, 1957 in Berlin ) was a German union leader and social democratic politician.

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The father was a carpenter, Bernhard trained as a bricklayer and plasterer after primary school . Until 1906 he worked as a bricklayer journeyman .

In 1900 he joined both the free trade unions and the SPD . From 1906 to 1914 he was managing director of the bricklayers 'and later construction workers' association in Heilbronn , Pforzheim and Strasbourg . In 1909 Bernhard was the strike leader of the bricklayers 'and construction workers' strike in Pforzheim: The builders 'demands were the introduction of piecework wages and the abolition of minimum wages , while the bricklayers' association demanded a wage increase from 54 to 60 pfennigs / hour and a reduction in weekly working hours by one and a half hours . The strike became a matter for the entire local trade union movement, Bernhard spoke of the strikers as "fighting soldiers of the proletarian army". In 1911 and 1912 he was also city ​​councilor and chairman of the local SPD in Pforzheim. Bernhard was a soldier during the First World War . After the war he was first secretary until 1924, then from 1924 to 1927 vice chairman and from 1927 to 1933 first chairman of the construction workers' association or the building trade association, initially in Hamburg and later in Berlin . He was also President of the Construction Workers' International from 1932. Since 1929 trade union action has been increasingly restricted by the global economic crisis . This also reduced Bernhard's ability to influence. His request to Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning to counteract the high unemployment, especially in the construction sector, through job creation measures, remained unsuccessful.

From 1930 to 1933 Bernhard was a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council . In addition, he had numerous other functions such as Reich labor judge , chairman of the supervisory board of the Association of Social Construction Companies and member of the federal board of the ADGB .

From 1930 to 1932 and again in 1933 Bernhard was a member of the Reichstag . He was imprisoned at the beginning of the National Socialist regime . In the following years, Bernhard kept in contact with the union resistance and was repeatedly hit by house searches and summons from the Gestapo . In connection with the outbreak of war, he was a prisoner in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and various prisons from September to December 1939 . He was arrested again in 1944 as part of the Grid Action and imprisoned again in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Immediately after the end of the war, Bernhard was chairman of IG Bau in Greater Berlin and was the third chairman of the FDGB from 1947 to 1948 . In December 1948 he resigned from the SED and the FDGB because he did not want to support the Stalinization policy and went to West Berlin .

literature

  • Social Democratic Party of Germany (ed.): Committed to freedom. Memorial book of the German social democracy in the 20th century. Marburg 2000, ISBN 3-89472-173-1 , p. 35f.
  • Andreas Herbst : Bernhard, Nikolaus . In: Dieter Dowe, Karlheinz Kuba, Manfred Wilke (Hrsg.): FDGB-Lexikon. Function, structure, cadre and development of a mass organization of the SED (1945–1990) . Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86872-240-6 .
  • Free press. (SPD newspaper in Pforzheim), July 24, 1909.
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

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personal data
SURNAME Bernhard, Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German union chairman and politician (SPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Buhl
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 1957
Place of death Berlin