Walter Oettinghaus

Walter Oettinghaus

Walter Oettinghaus or Öttinghaus (born February 26, 1883 in Gevelsberg , † September 17, 1950 in Ennepetal ) was a socialist politician and trade unionist .

Life

The metal worker Oettinghaus joined the SPD in 1901 and was honorary manager of the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV) in his hometown from 1905 onwards and full-time manager from 1910 onwards . In the same year he was also elected to the municipal council of Milspe and the provincial parliament of the province of Westphalia . Briefly soldier during the First World War , Oettinghaus joined the newly founded USPD in 1917 and was People's Commissar for the Schwelm district and a member of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in Milspe during the November Revolution . During the Kapp Putsch in 1920, Oettinghaus was part of the political leadership of the Red Ruhr Army .

In June 1920 Oettinghaus was for the constituency Westphalia south in the Reichstag voted, which it initially belonged to May 1924. In September 1922 he joined as the majority of the USPD again the SPD, whose district organization he headed in Schwelm in subsequent years . Oettinghaus, who belonged to the left wing of the SPD around Paul Levi , Max Seydewitz and Kurt Rosenfeld , was re-elected to the Reichstag in 1930, where he was one of the group of nine SPD members who openly accept his party's policy of tolerance towards the Heinrich Brüning government criticized and in several cases, such as in the votes on the construction of the armored ship A, the factional discipline broke.

After an unsuccessful candidacy for the party executive at the SPD party conference in June 1931 in Leipzig, Oettinghaus declared his conversion to the KPD at the end of September that year and tried to prevent the founding of the SAPD by his previous comrades around Rosenfeld and Seydewitz. Although Oettinghaus was critical of the KPD's RGO policy , he was expelled from the DMV and later accepted into the RGO Reich leadership. In the Reichstag elections in July and November 1932 , this time for the KPD, he was re-elected to the Reichstag in his old constituency of Westphalia-South.

After the "takeover" of the NSDAP succeeded Oettinghaus the night of the Reichstag fire into hiding and in May 1933 in the Netherlands to escape. Here and later in French exile, he worked closely with Willi Munzenberg and was active in the coordination committee of German trade unionists . Due to his criticism of the Moscow show trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact , Oettinghaus was expelled from the KPD. After the beginning of the war, Oettinghaus was temporarily interned in France and, after the French defeat in 1940, was endangered by an extradition request from the German Reich; he managed to escape to the USA via Algeria and Mexico in 1941 . When he emigrated, too, he participated in the resistance against the Nazi regime, particularly in considering a post-war order for Germany.

In 1948, Oettinghaus, seriously ill from a stroke, returned to Germany, where he was again involved in trade unions until his death.

literature

• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
• Oettinghaus, Walter . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Siegfried Mielke : Walter Oettinghaus (1883–1950). In: Siegfried Mielke, Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Emigrated metal trade unionists in the fight against the Nazi regime (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 3). Metropol, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-210-7 , pp. 237-252.
• Karin Jaspers / Wilfried Reinighaus: Westphalian-Lippian candidates in the January elections 1919. A biographical documentation , Münster: Aschendorff 2020 (Publications of the Historical Commission for Westphalia - New Series; 52), ISBN 9783402151365 , p. 152.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Oettinghaus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Walter Oettinghaus in the database of members of the Reichstag