Sepp Oerter

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Josef "Sepp" Oerter (born September 24, 1870 in Straubing , † December 14, 1928 in Braunschweig ) was a German politician. Oerter was initially a member of various anarchist and later socialist groups and parties, such as the USPD and the SPD and, after turning away from the left, the NSDAP .

Life

Early years

After attending a secondary school , the son of a sergeant trained as a bookbinder . In 1887 he joined the Social Democrats, but left them again in 1890 after a left-wing radical youth group that Oerter had supported was excluded from the party. Then he turned to anarchism .

Turn of the century

At the beginning of the 1890s, Oerter worked in Duisburg . Together with his brother Fritz (* 1869, † 1935 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ), he smuggled anarchist agitation material from the Netherlands to Germany. Due to increasing pressure to be persecuted by the police, Oerter, like many other comrades at the time, fled to the USA in 1892 , where he met other well-known anarchists, such as B. Peukert , Masuhr and Timmermann . Oerter was suspected by the authorities of having been involved in an attack by Alexander Berkman on Henry Clay Frick , director of the Carnegie steel mill in Pittsburg, in the same year . Financed by Emma Goldmann , he returned to Germany after a short time.

In December 1892, both brothers were arrested in Mainz for “seditious speeches”. The charge was "a call for explosives". Sepp Oerter was born on 25 October 1893 to eight years in prison sentenced, his brother Fritz to one year imprisonment.

The People's Friend House of the SPD in Braunschweig, 2011

After serving his sentence, he continued to be active in anarchist movements. He has appeared as a speaker at home and abroad. In 1906 he became editor-in-chief of the anarchist magazine Der Freie Arbeiter . He was also a board member of the Anarchist Federation Germany . In 1907 he took part in the founding congress of the Anarchist International in Amsterdam . Between his release (around 1902) and 1908 he wrote an autobiography .

In 1908 he lost his offices when it became known that he had embezzled money while working for the freelance worker . He then wrote for various bourgeois newspapers. In 1913 he joined the SPD and worked for their party newspaper Vorwärts . At the beginning of the First World War he became a member of the advisory board of the “youth education associations” of Greater Berlin.

In 1916 he finally came to Braunschweig to work as editor-in-chief for the SPD newspaper Volksfreund .

Politician in Braunschweig

When the SPD split in 1917, Oerter was elected to the top of the USPD. After briefly working for the Leipziger Volkszeitung in the summer of 1918 , he returned to Braunschweig on the evening of November 8, 1918 - initially too late to achieve his political goals, because on the same day, only a few hours earlier, it was his "competitors" August Merges managed the abdication of the last Brunswick Guelph -Herzogs Ernst-August to force.

During the period of wavering between the Soviet Republic and parliamentarism , which lasted for several months , Oerter succeeded in gaining participation in the government for his party after the great election victory of the USPD in 1920. Because of his aggressive rhetoric and tactical skills, he was always exposed to numerous hostilities from all sides, but was still considered one of the most important politicians in Braunschweig at that time.

During the time of the November Revolution in Braunschweig , Oerter was, as chairman of the workers 'and soldiers' councils, from November 10, 1918 to April 17, 1919, Minister of the Interior and Finance under August Merges (USPD). In the second state government, Oerter was finally Prime Minister of Braunschweig from June 22, 1920. During this time, however, he was only inadequate in implementing the political reform program that he had set out. Nevertheless, he enjoyed great popularity among the workforce in Braunschweig.

Heinrich Jasper (SPD), later Prime Minister of the Free State of Braunschweig , once characterized Oerter's Soviet Republic as the “ dictatorship of an undemocratic minority” .

During the internal party disputes within the USPD in 1920 on the question of joining the Communist International and merging with the KPD , Oerter positioned himself in the Braunschweig district organization together with Rudolf Löhr on the side of the right wing of the party around Arthur Crispien and supported the local Comintern Rejecting supporters around Carl Eckardt . Oerter was of the opinion that the principles of the USPD and the Comintern were incompatible with one another and, for tactical reasons, pleaded for cooperation with the social democratic Second International .

Exclusion from the USPD and entry into the NSDAP

Due to allegations of corruption and the acceptance of advantages in office, Oerter had to resign from the Prime Minister's office on November 24, 1921, whereupon his party friend Otto Grotewohl took over the leadership role in the USPD. In the spring of 1922 Oerter was expelled from the USPD because of these allegations. He escaped several months' imprisonment for corruption only because of an amnesty . After being expelled from the party, Oerter swung politically on the nationalist line and finally became a member of the NSDAP in January 1924, which was represented in this way for the first time in the Braunschweig state parliament. After 1925, Oerter withdrew from politics. He died of a heart attack in 1928 .

Quotes about Oerter

  • In November 1893, during his criminal trial, the central organ of the German social democracy , the newspaper Vorwärts , described Oerter with the words “semi-crazy” and “mentally disabled person”.
  • Hermann Schroff (contemporary witness of the November Revolution): “Spiritually, Oerter is undoubtedly superior to his fellow thinker Merges. Merges never quite knew what he wanted, Oerter, on the other hand, went strictly and ruthlessly towards his goal; he knew what to achieve with the help of his chameleon-like adaptability and his eloquence, with which he knew how to counter all objections of procrastinators. "
  • Rudolf Rocker , a German anarcho-syndicalist , wrote in his memoirs From the Memoirs of a German Anarchist (Frankfurt am Main, 1974): “He [Sepp Oerter] served his sentence until the last day and, after his release, took part in our movement for a few years Editor of the Free Workers in Berlin. Later he went through all kinds of changes ... "

obituary

In 1929 Erich Mühsam wrote the obituary in the magazine Fanal, which he published, to the Glorious End of Oerter's death.

Critical re-evaluation of lifetime achievement

In the context of the debate about an appreciation of the political life work of the Brunswick politician Minna Faßhauer , the SPD parliamentary group in the Brunswick city council made a motion in August 2013, in this context also the lives of other Brunswick politicians from the time of the November Revolution in Brunswick , the Weimar Republic to to subject the city to a critical reassessment towards the time of National Socialism . This proposal was supported by the CDU parliamentary group. The people whose life achievements are to be reevaluated include: Otto Grotewohl (first Prime Minister of the GDR ), Carl Heimbs ( DVP , responsible for the naturalization of Adolf Hitler ), Werner Küchenthal , August Merges ( USPD , first President of the Socialists Republic of Braunschweig ), Sepp Oerter ( anarchist , USPD , Prime Minister of Braunschweig, later NSDAP ) and Ernst August Roloff ( DNVP , founder of BEL ).

Autobiography and Publications

  • Eight years in prison. Life memories. Verlag der Tribüne, Berlin 1908, OCLC 15346812 .
  • I - Sepp Oerter - complain to the central management of the USPD in Berlin, the party authorities of the USPD in Braunschweig, the parliamentary group of the USPD in Braunschweig, the Minister Grotewohl in Braunschweig for the most infamous political assassination. Self-published, Braunschweig 1922, OCLC 72178016 .
  • Political peep box for the German people: pictures from the internal political life of a German member state. Hüpke & Sohn, Holzminden 1923, OCLC 80371896 .
  • A convert's confession. In: Enlightenment sheets. No. 147. German Renewal Community, Leipzig 1924, OCLC 73000591 .

literature

Literary processing

  • Ehm withered : in the morning mist. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1953. (In the novel by the contemporary witness Welk, the November Revolution in Braunschweig and the time up to the suppression of the “Socialist Republic of Braunschweig” is presented. The novel is based on Welk's own experiences as well as on historical research by his wife. Sepp Oerter and other historical persons are represented by their names slightly alienated [ Sepp Modler ].) OCLC 250545011 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Teutonicus (= pseudonym of Hermann Schroff): Braunschweig under the rule of the red flag. Opinions, moods and facts . without publisher, place or year (approx. 1920), OCLC 57501321 .
  2. ↑ SPD application of August 26, 2013: From Ernst August to August Merges to Heinrich Jasper - The time of the Weimar Republic in Braunschweig from the beginnings to the beginning of fascism (PDF file)
personal data
SURNAME Oerter, Sepp
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oerter, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Straubing
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1928
Place of death Braunschweig