Otto Krautz

Otto Krautz (born February 19, 1880 in Brandenburg an der Havel , † November 22, 1953 in Berlin ) was a German trade unionist.

Life and work in the empire

Otto Krautz was born on February 19, 1880 as the son of a cigar maker in Brandenburg an der Havel . After attending primary school in his hometown, he completed a four and a half year apprenticeship as a typesetter in Havelberg . On October 7, 1898, he joined the Association of German Book Printers in Neuruppin . On his hike in the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area, Krautz decided to stay in Essen . In the same year he joined the SPD . From 1902 on, the Brandenburg man took on various functions in the union and party: local and district chairman of his union, member of the collective bargaining district office, trade court assessor, employee-side chairman of the general local health insurance fund in Essen and member of the board of the Essen trade union cartel, the loose association of the individual trade unions on site. There were also a number of other municipal honorary positions.

Trade union advancement in the Weimar Republic

In 1914, the trade unionist was drafted into the war and later spent two years in British captivity. Not released until the end of 1919, his colleagues immediately reinstated him in his position as district manager of the printers' union. Proposed "as a man of the people" at the Nuremberg trade union convention from October 16 to 24, in 1920, he narrowly prevailed against the opposition Otto Vierath from Berlin with 75 votes to 61 in the election for second chairman , but he waived because of the lack of trust on the office. He only accepted the election after a broad vote of confidence throughout the Association Day. With the election of a functionary as 2nd chairman, who had never previously held the office of Gauleiter (today one would say: Landesleiter), the printing association entered uncharted territory. Otto Krautz went to Berlin with his wife Maria in October 1920 . In 1926 they moved into an apartment in the newly built association house on Dreibundstrasse.

At the end of 1928 - after the surprising death of the Bavarian association chairman Joseph Seitz - Krautz was then elected to head the Association of German Book Printers. In this capacity he also headed the "Graphisches Bund", a loose cartel merger of all four free trade union organizations in the graphics industry. He also held other functions as assistant chairman of the Reich Arbitration Office for Book Printers and as a member of the Secretariat Commission of the Book Printers International. In 1927 he became a Reich Labor Judge at the Reich Labor Court in Leipzig , and in 1930 he was a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council as an employee representative of the “Crafts Group”.

The cautious chairman of the book printers' association, who always tried to find compromises within the union, had an almost charismatic effect on the younger generation of functionaries. Politically, Krautz was seen as a moderate social democrat, and gave devastating rejections to communist-oriented trade union efforts. KPD members of the printers' union accused him of joining forces with the forces planning an attack on the Soviet Union .

The time of National Socialism

Imprisoned after the printing house was occupied in May 1933 and taken into protective custody by the Nazis for four weeks , Otto Krautz was unemployed until mid-1935, but then found a job with the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung , where a factor (typesetting manager) protected his hands held several former functionaries of the Association of German Book Printers. During the war, the trade unionist took part in illegal meetings in Prague and kept in touch with Dutch and Swiss colleagues in the International Graphic Federation. When the war broke out, Krautz was called on to do community service and was employed in the food industry in Greater Berlin . His apartment in Berlin-Mariendorf was bombed out during the war.

Union political activities after 1945

Immediately after the end of the war, the old chairman took part in rebuilding the Berlin trade unions. As early as 1945 a member of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) and entrusted with the management of the industrial union for graphic trade and paper processing in Greater Berlin , Otto Krautz was elected first chairman of this union in the Soviet-occupied zone in June 1946. In the period from August 1, 1946 until his resignation on May 1, 1949, he was also a member of the FDGB federal board in his capacity as chairman of the industrial union. Immediately after the end of the war, he rejoined the SPD; as a “West Berliner” he went with the union of the SPD and KPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1946 .

At interzonal conferences and as a member of the Reich Committee of German graphic workers, Otto Krautz campaigned emphatically for national trade union unity. He assumed that the political reunification of all zones was imminent. In the meantime, Krautz came under massive political pressure in his zone. In 1947 the Soviet military administration gave clear instructions to remove SPD members from executive positions in the individual trade unions. In January 1948, SED member Krautz and the majority of the board of directors of the graphic trade union rejected the SED's demands to dismiss full-time functionaries because of their SPD membership. Within trade unions, controversial discussions about the continued existence of the divisions played a central role. By a federal board decision of the FDGB from the spring of 1949 Otto Krautz was then induced to resign.

In 1951, as a Berliner in his second hometown of Essen, the unionist Krautz, shot down by the SED apparatus, applied for resumption of membership in the newly founded industrial union for printing and paper in the three western occupation zones . There were controversial discussions about this application within the Gau (regional district) West Berlin . The majority of the Berlin board accused him of not breaking free from the FDGB in time and refused to join.

In the course of 1952 it was accepted, although the modalities remained unclear. With Otto Krautz, hundreds of Berlin colleagues who had long belonged to the FDGB had applied for membership. The accession to the West German IG Druck und Papier probably “passed” the Berlin Gauvorstand. The Berlin SPD also refused to accept the former SED member Krautz. He was able to record a success shortly before Christmas 1952, when he received a first advance payment on his compensation application in West Berlin. In 1952 Krautz also received disability benefits from the Berlin IG Druck und Papier, and he also visited the old, restored meeting room in the House of German Book Printers in Berlin-Kreuzberg .

Otto Krautz died of cardiac insufficiency on November 22, 1953 and was cremated in the Berlin-Wilmersdorf crematorium with great sympathy from his colleagues .

Works

• The German book trade In: Börsenblatt for the German book trade. 96: 526-528 (1929).

literature

• Detlev Brunner: Social Democrats in the FDGB. From trade union to mass organization, 1945 to the early 1950s . Klartext, Essen 2000, ISBN 3-88474-863-7 .
• Rüdiger Zimmermann : Karl Helmholz and his friends. A “stumbling block” in front of the Buchdruckerhaus , Karl-Richter-Verein, Berlin 2013.

Web links

• Krautz, Otto . In: Dieter Dowe , Karlheinz Kuba, Manfred Wilke . Arranged by Michael Kuba. (Ed.): FDGB-Lexikon. Function, structure, cadre and development of a mass organization of the SED (1945-1990) . Berlin 2009 ( online ).