Philipp Mees

Philipp Mees (born April 5, 1901 in Kaiserslautern ; died August 1, 1971 there ) was a resistance fighter against National Socialism in the Third Reich and a politician . The Philipp-Mees-Platz in front of the West Palatinate Police Headquarters in Kaiserslautern is named after him.

Life

Philipp Mees was the son of the locomotive stoker Philipp Mees and his wife Elisabeth. From May 1907 to April 1915 he attended elementary school and then until May 1918 the Kaiserslautern technical school for mechanical engineering and electrical engineering at the royal district high school . At the same time he also learned the locksmith trade . Until November 1918 he worked at the cast and armatures factory in Kaiserslautern and then moved to the Reichsbahn repair factory in Kaiserslautern .

Philipp Mees was a member of the Free Railway Union from 1919 and also a member of the SPD from March 1921 . As part of his SPD activities, he also took part in various political training courses. In September 1930 he attended, among other things, the federal school of the General German Trade Union Federation in Bernau near Berlin .

At the beginning of the 1930s he was the deputy works council member and chairman of the shop stewards at the Reichsbahn repair shop in Kaiserslautern. From October 1932 he studied with the support of the General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) at the "Academy of work" of the University in Frankfurt am Main . In April 1933, however, he had to break off his studies because the academy was closed by the National Socialists. Mees was initially unemployed until 1937. In 1938, however, he worked as a locksmith at Pfaff .

On October 28, 1938, Mees was arrested for preparation for high treason , as he was considered the main functionary of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP) in the eyes of the National Socialists . Another 18 people were arrested with him. In fact, Mees, who had been a functionary of the SPD before 1933, was a functionary of the SAP in Kaiserslautern and had close ties to the central management in Mannheim , including Karl Nord and Willy Petry . Mees worked with the Socialist Youth Workers (SAJ) through Jonathan Volk . He allegedly had connections to the social democratic leadership of the Saar region , took part in several illegal meetings in Basel and for years obtained large quantities of newspapers and publications for distribution in Kaiserslautern and the surrounding area. a. The banner of revolutionary unity , the New Front and the Socialist Watchdog . In June 1939, the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court sentenced him to three years and four months in prison , which he served in Ludwigsburg prison.

After his stay in prison, Philipp Mees was not released, but taken to the Dachau concentration camp and imprisoned there as a "protective prisoner" with the number 29/650. After a year and a half imprisonment in Dachau, he was forcibly drafted into the SS Storm Brigade Dirlewanger on November 9, 1944 . In his role as an assault brigadist, he fought in Hungary . On May 1, 1945, however, he defected at the front and was briefly captured by the Soviets near Frankfurt (Oder) . He returned to Kaiserslautern in autumn 1945.

Mees helped with the political and union new beginning and was one of the first members of the community committee of Kaiserslautern, which was reinstated by the occupying power of France . In May 1946 he represented the Palatinate SPD district chairman, Franz Bögler, at the Western Zone Party Congress in Hanover .

On September 15, 1946, Mees was elected a city council member and was then for more than 20 years a member of the local SPD parliamentary group. From 1946 to 1966 he was the full-time district chairman of the German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB) . In addition, he was a member of the administrative committee of the state labor office and board member of the AOK as well as chief labor judge. He worked in the REFA -Landesverband Rheinland-Pfalz and was also active in the Lendvay Choir .

Mees died on August 1, 1971 after a serious illness at the age of 70. In its obituary, the Rheinpfalz newspaper praised him as an “upright democrat who had put his life at the service of the working people”.

Awards

In 1963 Mees was awarded the Freiherr vom Stein plaque .

In 2017, Mees was honored with a stumbling block on the square named after him in Kaiserslautern.

literature

• Wolfgang Müller: Philipp Mees (1901–1971) - A biographical sketch , published in: District group Kaiserslautern in the Historisches Verein der Pfalz (Ed.): Yearbook for the history of the city and district of Kaiserslautern 1996/97 , Kaiserslautern 1998, pp. 305–311 .

Web links

• Philipp Mees. In: vvn-bda-kl.de. Retrieved March 6, 2018 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stumbling blocks in KL. In: stolpersteine-kl.de. November 9, 2017, accessed March 6, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Stolperstein sponsorship for Philipp Mees. Accessed March 15, 2018 (German).