Wilhelm Sander (politician)

Wilhelm Sander (born May 6, 1895 in Dresden , † July 26, 1978 in Bonn ) was a social democratic politician, trade union official and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Sander grew up in a social democratic family. He attended elementary school and from 1910 learned the plumber and locksmith trade. In 1909 he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ). A year later he became a member of the SPD . At the same time he joined the free trade union German Metalworkers Association (DMV), for which he took on a number of functions in the years to come.

From 1915 Sander was a soldier in the First World War . After refusing to give orders , he was held in prison until the end of the war . Between March 1919 and the end of 1920 he was managing director and chairman of the DMV branch in Neuruppin . In 1920 he moved to the USPD and was party secretary of the Greater Dresden sub-district until 1922 and at times a member of the central USPD party council. In 1922 he returned to the SPD. From 1925 to 1933 Sander was a member of the city council in Dresden. In 1933 he was briefly a member of the Saxon state parliament . In addition, he was temporarily a member of the central SPD party committee and a member of the Dresden district committee and the district management of the DMV.

After the beginning of the National Socialist rule, he was arrested in connection with the smashing of the trade unions on May 2, 1933 and imprisoned in Berlin-Plötzensee . On May 13, 1933, the Nazi persecutors released him again. For fear of being arrested again, Sander emigrated to Czechoslovakia at the end of May 1933 . There he was responsible for helping social democratic refugees on behalf of the party leadership. Due to the occupation of the Sudeten area , Sander emigrated to Stockholm in 1938 , where he continued to look for accommodation for refugees. In the same year Sander went to England . There he took over the state representation of the SPD in Great Britain and also worked there in refugee aid. He was also the editor of union exile publications. In the early 1940s, Sander was an active functionary of the National Group of German Trade Unionists (LdG) in Great Britain. Intensive considerations regarding a post-war order for the German Reich were discussed in this group. From 1945 Sander was also chairman of the Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain . As such, he was also the editor of the magazine Sozialistische Mitteilungen , which Kurt Lorenz printed. In 1946 he took part in the first post-war party congress of the SPD in 1946 as a representative of the emigrants.

Sander did not return to Germany until September 1949. Until 1962 he worked as a secretary for the SPD parliamentary group and was temporarily a member of the city council in Bonn. There he was one of the co-founders of the Volksbühne and was chairman of the local executive committee of the working group of persecuted social democrats from 1965 to 1970 .

literature

• Benjamin Rostalski: Wilhelm Sander (1895–1978) , In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (ed.) With the assistance of Julia Pietsch: Emigrierte Metallgewerkschafter 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. 293-306.

Web links

• Biography of Wilhelm Sander . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
• Introduction to Socialist Communications