Werner Nef

Werner Nef (born April 6, 1902 in Lindau ( Bavaria ); † August 25, 1980 in Rodá de Bara , Spain ; entitled to live in Urnäsch ) was a Swiss fighter against Spain , president of the Social Democratic Party of the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden and one of the founders of the party of Work (PdA).

Life

Werner Nef was the son of Lisett Nef, an embroiderer . In 1939 he married Victoire Lucienne Herbain, French .

Nef spent his early childhood in the Urnäsch orphanage . Later he served as a contracting boy and handyman . From 1924 to 1926 Nef was a soldier in the Foreign Legion . After his desertion , Nef joined the SP in 1932 . From 1933 he had contacts with German communist refugees . From 1936 he organized border crossings for Spain volunteers from Austria to Switzerland. Nef fought in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 in the Chapayev battalion and with the partisans on the southern front. In 1938 he returned to Switzerland and was imprisoned for four months.

Nef worked from 1935 to 1936 and from 1939 to 1944 as president of the social democratic party Appenzell Ausserrhoden. From 1939 he also worked as a workers secretary in Herisau and was an honorary member of the Satus gymnastics association . From 1940 until it was banned in 1941, Nef was one of the spokesmen for the SP opposition . He had close ties to the Communist Party and was one of the founders of the PdA. At Nef's initiative, the Social Democratic Cantonal Party joined the Labor Party in 1944 as the workers and peasants' party in Ausserrhoden. From 1946 to 147, Nef represented the PdA in the municipal council of the city of St. Gallen . In 1951 he emigrated with his family for economic reasons. In the Soviet zone of occupation in Vienna he took over the management of an oil and coal company . He spent his retirement in Spain from 1968.

literature

• Thomas Fuchs: History of the Herisau community. Herisau: Appenzeller Verlag 1999, pp. 409-411.
• José Gotovitch: Le Comintern: l'histoire et les hommes: dictionnaire biographique de l'Internationale communiste en France, en Belgique, au Luxembourg, en Suisse et à Moscou (1919–1943). Paris: Editions de l'Atelier 2001, p. 437.
• Ralph Hug: St. Gallen, Moscow, Aragón: the life of the Spanish fighter Walter Wagner. Zurich: Rotpunkt-Verlag 2007.

Web links

• Brigitte Studer: Werner Nef. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . December 16, 2008 , accessed June 15, 2020 .

This version of the article is based on Brigitte Studer's entry in the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), which, according to theHLS's usage information, is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Distribution under the same conditions 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)license. If the article has been revised and expanded to such an extent that it differs significantly from the HLS article, this module will be removed. The original text and a reference to the license can also be found in the version history of the article.