Paul Kämpf

Paul Kämpf (born July 15, 1885 , † March 21, 1953 ) was a German social democrat and trade unionist.

Empire

Paul Kämpf was a skilled craftsman, locksmith, and already on his "Walz" (1903-1905) was active for the German Metalworkers' Association. He joined the SPD in Berlin in 1904 . In Kassel, at that time a stronghold of social democracy, he got to know Philipp Scheidemann and August Bebel personally.

In October 1905 he was drafted into the 1st Shipyard Division in Kiel as a conscript, trained as a stoker and machinist and in January 1906 sent to China, to the German colony of Tsingtao. He spent two and a half years there as a stoker of the steam boat “Kiautschou” and reports in great detail and vividly from this time in his memoirs , which are privately owned by the family. His memoirs end in 1912.

Paul Kämpf worked as a foreman in various companies from 1908 to 1914. In addition, since 1909 he was an honorary functionary of the German Metalworkers' Association and the SPD. In the times when he was dismissed and unemployed because of his union activities, only his wife Luise's work at home could secure his livelihood.

Between 1914 and 1918 he took part in the First World War.

Weimar Republic

Between 1919 and 1921 he was works manager in the metal industry. From 1921 to 1922 he was a full-time secretary of the SPD in Bitterfeld . After that he was district manager of the central association of machinists and stokers in Frankfurt am Main until 1924 . Then he was secretary of the SPD sub-district Merseburg until March 1933 .

There he was also a member of the city council and the magistrate. He was also a member of the Provincial Assembly of the Province of Saxony . He was also a board member of Mitteldeutsche Landesbank.

time of the nationalsocialism

With the beginning of the National Socialist rule he became unemployed in 1933. He was imprisoned between June and September 1933. Then he opened a legal and economic advice center, which was closed shortly afterwards at the instigation of the Gestapo. After that he was the owner of a grocery store until 1941. In 1939 he was committed to the war and from November 1942 he was manager of a screw factory. Fighting has been associated with the attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 during the action grid in the Buchenwald concentration camp deported and freed by the cruel conditions of survival there along with the other surviving prisoners in April 1945 by American soldiers. He was a co-signer of the Buchenwald Manifesto .

post war period

He returned to Waltershausen and was a member of the Federation of Democratic Socialists in Thuringia, a forerunner organization of the re-established SPD. In May 1945 he was elected mayor of the city of Waltershausen in Thuringia. He held this post until 1949.

Paul Kämpf enjoyed a very high reputation among the population and among American officers. After the Americans had left Thuringia as part of the agreement on the status of Berlin, the Soviet Red Army took over the administration. The Russian officers also showed him great respect, but he could not prevent the dismantling of the local industrial plants, for example the Ade works, where machine tools were manufactured.

The situation became difficult from 1946, when the SPD and KPD were forced to merge into the SED . Kämpf became a member of the SED in April 1946.

Since his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, Kämpf had repeatedly had major health problems, especially since he never spared himself and was very active politically. In 1949 he collapsed in the Thuringian Forest and never really recovered until his death on March 21, 1953.

His grave in the Eisenach cemetery was abandoned in 2012 and his tombstone was disposed of (information from the Eisenach cemetery administration in April 2017).

literature

• Wolfgang Röll: Social Democrats in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp 1937-1945. Göttingen, 2000 p. 292f.