Walter Uhlmann

Walter Uhlmann (born June 14, 1904 in Leipzig , † June 11, 1991 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German politician and trade unionist.

Life

After school he completed an apprenticeship as a precision mechanic. At the age of fifteen he became a member of the Free Socialist Youth in 1919 , the DMV a year later and the KJVD in 1923 . Soon he became a member of the district management for West Saxony, then went to the Rhineland as political district manager. In 1928 he returned to Leipzig, where he was expelled as a Brandlerian at the end of the year . He joined the Communist Party opposition and moved to Berlin, where he became the political leader of the KJ opposition , whose organ, Junge Kampf, he published. After the handover of power to the NSDAP , he began illegal resistance work and organized a network of left-wing metal workers in several Berlin companies. That could only be a cadre organization that brought together metal workers from all workers' parties. In the illegal magazine Der Metallarbeiter , the position of these illegal trade unionists was formulated as follows: The most urgent obligations are:

• no voluntary transfer to the National Socialist German Labor Front (DAF) .
• Association of colleagues to lay the foundation for the formation of independent class unions. These could not be mass organizations, but small cadre groups.
• no participation in DAF events.
• no assumption of functions in the DAF.

Walter Uhlmann criticized the fact that the leadership of the free trade unions had surrendered in the hope of being able to survive with their organizations. After their call to participate in the Nazi celebrations on May 1, 1933, the National Socialists destroyed this illusion in the early morning of May 2, 1933 by occupying all union offices and arresting most of the officials. The KPD lived under a different illusion. It urged its members to work in the DAF, also to apply for positions in order to then be able to lead company disputes. Uhlmann accused the KPD of still failing to understand the brutally dictatorial character of all institutions.

Uhlmann had to live illegally for years to work on the illegal consolidation of trade unionists. From 1934 to 1937 he was a member of the Berlin Committee of the KPD-O , which organized the work throughout the Reich. In February 1937 this Reich leadership was arrested. On November 24, 1937, he was sentenced by the Reichsgericht to 8 years in prison and 8 years of loss of honor, which he served in the Brandenburg-Görden prison. In the process in which the eight other members of the Reich leadership were sentenced to a total of 54.5 years in prison and many years of loss of honor, he professed communism in his last speech.

In the Brandenburg prison he was temporarily busy with outside work and was therefore able to provide his comrades with political information. After the liberation he lived in East Berlin and worked for the BVG . He became a member of the SED . In 1950, in connection with the kidnapping and arrest of his brother-in-law Kurt Müller (2nd chairman of the KPD in the FRG), he was subjected to intensive interrogation by the ZPKK . In 1953 he left the GDR. First he worked in a metal factory in Constance . In 1955 he became editor of the organ of IG Metall. He joined the SPD in 1969 . Retired in 1969, he lived in Frankfurt am Main, where he died on June 11, 1991.

Fonts (selection)

• Metal workers in the anti-fascist resistance. Information Center Berlin; Stauffenbergstrasse Memorial and Educational Center, Berlin 1982, (Series: Articles on Resistance, Issue 21), as a PDF file on the website of the German Resistance Memorial Center .
• To die to live Political prisoner in Brandenburg-Göhrden prison 1933–1945. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1983.
• Trade union resistance groups in the Nazi era. In: trade unionists. 1966, 5, (pp. 175-178).

literature

• Theodor Bergmann : Against the current. The history of the KPD (opposition). Hamburg 2004 (with a short biography about Walter Uhlmann, p. 550).
• Uhlmann, Walter . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945. 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Short biography of the German Resistance Memorial Center