Rudolf Rafoth

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Rudolf Rafoth (born February 24, 1911 in Wolgast ; † November 5, 1964 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German politician ( KPD ) and from 1946 to 1951 a member of the Bremen citizenship and a trade union functionary.

Life

Rafoth trained as a commercial clerk and became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the early 1930s . He worked full-time in the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) for the party. Because of his anti-fascist activities he was arrested in 1933 and taken to the Mißler concentration camp .

After the liberation in 1945 he belonged to the fighting group against fascism . He took over the job of a syndicus of the Bremen Employees' Chamber and became political director of the KPD district leadership in Bremen. From 1945 to 1951 he was in the district and state management of the KPD in Bremen. From 1946 to 1951 he was a member of the Bremen citizenship and at the same time parliamentary group leader of the KPD.

Since April 1951, the head office of the KPD in Germany has been replacing him as parliamentary group chairman, as he and the parliamentary group had approved the Senate's budget on March 30, 1951 after consulting with his Bremen party. However, this behavior was then criticized as "opportunistic" and the state secretariat ultimately called on him to resign from the parliamentary group chairmanship and his citizenship mandate. On April 12, 1951, Rafoth complied with this demand, which was published on April 13, 1951 in the Tribune of Democracy under the title “This is how no communist faction should act”. Shortly thereafter, he wrote a self-critical article. He lost his mandate in the state organization, but in April 1951 became the first district secretary of the KPD in Bremen-Nord. In May 1951 he resigned from this office. In August 1951 he was finally expelled from the KPD. This was followed by a series of party exclusion proceedings in the Bremen KPD, including those against Reinhold and Käthe Popall .

Rafoth then became an authorized representative of the German Employees' Union (DAG) in Braunschweig and in 1961, during Otto Brenner's time , a member of the main board of the IG Metall trade union in Frankfurt am Main .

literature

  • Hendrik Bunke: The KPD in Bremen. 1945–1968 (= dissertation University of Bremen 2001.) PapyRossa , Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-89438-230-9 . ( Online version, PDF )
  • Hendrik Bunke: The purification of the party. Conflicts in the Bremen KPD 1951/52 . In: Labor Movement and Social History , 1998

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ unemployed. Company-specific individual training . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 1956, pp. 18-19 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Rafoth, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), Member of the Bundestag and trade union official
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Wolgast
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 1964
Place of death Frankfurt am Main