William Gillies (politician, 1885)

William Gillies (* 1885 in Glasgow ; † January 1958 ) was a British political functionary. Gillies was the Labor Party's first International Secretary .

Life and activity

Gillies began to get involved in the labor movement early on. From 1907 to 1910 he worked as the financial secretary of the Glasgow Clarion Scouts. He then made a career in the Scottish section of the Fabian Society in Glasgow, whose secretary he eventually became.

In January 1915, Gillies joined the Labor Party as a full-time functionary: From then on he was secretary of the Labor Party Information Bureau in the Labor Party's headquarters in London, the Transport House .

International Secretary of the Labor Party (1920-1944)

Interwar period (1920 to 1939)

1920 took Gillies bearing the title of an "international secretary" (international secretary) the management of the newly created International Department of Labor (International Department of the Labor Party) , which he was almost a quarter of a century, until the end of 1944, hold.

In his position as his party's international secretary, Gillies took part in almost all of the major international conferences of the socialist parties in Europe between the two world wars. Furthermore, he was during these years the office and the Executive Council of the Socialist Workers' International (Bureau and Executive Council of the Labor and Socialist International) at. Because of his position within the party apparatus, Gillies also held the function of secretary of the Labor Party's sub-committee for international affairs of its executive branch. He was also responsible for editing the organ of his department, the International Supplement Labor Press Service .

Since 1933, Gillies, as International Secretary of the Labor Party, was in a leading role in enabling refugees and emigrants from the camp of continental European social democracy, who wanted to escape the ever-expanding sphere of influence of the fascist systems in Europe, to enter Great Britain. to look after them after their arrival in Great Britain.

Gillie's position as a leading figure in the Labor Party's foreign policy brought him into the sights of the National Socialist police forces at the end of the 1930s, who ultimately classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who the Nazi surveillance apparatus regarded them as particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be located and arrested with special priority in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the occupation troops following special SS units.

Second World War

In the autumn of 1939, after the start of the Second World War, Gillies, in agreement with the British government, pushed ahead with the creation of a propaganda committee made up of German social democratic emigrants to act as an advisory body to the International Department of the Labor Party.

In 1940 Gillies was instrumental in organizing the entry of a number of senior SOPADE functionaries stranded in Lisbon to Great Britain on behalf of his party leader Hugh Dalton, who wanted to involve the Labor Party in the British war effort against the Nazi system. After the arrival of these men - u. a. Vogel and Erich Ollenhauer - Gillies supported them in the establishment of the Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain in March 1941 .

During the war, like many British socialists, Gillies moved further and further to the right politically under the influence of the war events: Symptomatic of this was a later very well-known, but at that time only for internal use, 'Gillies Memorandum', which spoke fluent German, dated October 1941 (German Social Democracy. Notes on its Foreign Policy) . In this, Gillies outlined his ideas for the future orientation of the foreign policy line of his party, whereby he went into court in particular with the German Social Democrats: This is how he assessed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the German trade unions due to their role during the First World War and in the Weimar Republic as “historical pillars” of the expansive German nationalism of the past decades. In particular, he accused them of first financing the warfare of the German Empire in World War I, of having made a pact with the generals after 1918 and covering up Germany's secret rearmament, and of having finally abdicated before the resurgent nationalism and voted for Hitler's demands for revision. He further accused the Social Democrats of being basically Pan-Germanistic and nationalistic. The bottom line was that she had betrayed democracy, socialism and international law and, in the face of chauvinism in its dangerous power, did not recognize it, surrendered to it or cooperated with it, and thus came to the conclusion that the Germans were to blame collectively in this aggressive nationalism see ("The Second German World War brings back memories of the first one who was a lesson to us."). On the basis of these considerations, Gillies finally came to the conclusion that the German Social Democrats were basically "National Socialists".

Gillies' memorandum, which was later approved by the Labor Party executive, had a significant impact on the party's attitude towards the SPD in exile (SOPADE) in Britain during the final years of the war. Gillies drew practical consequences from his condemnation of SOPADE by first attempting to make it an appendage of the British Labor Party, and then, after this failed, attempting to systematically destroy it. His increasingly aggressive positioning against the forces of the German political spectrum, which most British consider to be moderate, also found expression in public statements, for example in the foreword he contributed to Fritz Bieligk's brochure Stresemann. The German Liberals' Foreign Policy . hold Jörg Thunecke rated Gillies due to its development and activities from 1941 to 1944 in a study of the right-wing socialists in Britain during the Second World War, alongside Walter Loeb and Robert Vansittart , as the most responsible for the occurred in these years clouding of the relationships between these both party and accuses him of engaging in “destructive persecution of fellow socialists” and leading the Labor Party into the Vansittarts camp, who propagated an undifferentiated anti-Germanism.

Glee summed up this question, similar to Thunecke, that even if both parties - the SPD and the Labor Party - had survived intact the conflict into which they were plunged with Gillies significantly involved, it was still a mistake to believe that Gillies 'Work did not cause any damage, because the mistrust of the motives of the other side, which was sown in this way, had a negative effect well into the period after 1945 and had a negative impact on many political decisions (“Serious distrust of each other's motives clouded many political decisions in the post-war period. ").

The frosty relationship between the Labor Party and the SPD that had developed in the final years of the war only began after the (involuntary) removal of Gillies from his post at the end of 1944 and the assumption of Denis Healey as his party's new International Secretary in 1945 to gradually improve.

Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt identifies the late Gillies in her biography of Erich Ollenhauer as one of the “most ardent German haters” in Great Britain, whereby she bases her negative judgment on testimonies from some European Social Democrats who knew him during this time. These describe Gillies in the end of his career as an “incorrigible chauvinist” and “the least sociable socialist” he would have ever met (Hakoon Lie) or as a man with “the intensity of his prejudices and resentments in direct proportion to the narrowness of his horizon ”( Richard Löwenthal ).

Gillie's estate is held today at the Labor History Archive & Study Center in Manchester .

Fonts

• Labor Party International Department: Notes Concerning the Foreign Policy of the German Social Democratic Party during the World War, 1914-18, and on the Eve of the Third Reich by William Gillies nad Philip Noel-Baker, MP , Curty Geyer, December 1941.

literature

• The Labor Who's Who , 1927, p. 77.
• Christine Collette: " William Gillies ", in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford 2004, pp. 281f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Gillies on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
2. ↑ Jörg Thunecke: “Fight for Freedom. A Vansittartist Network of Rightwing German Socialist in Great Britain (1941-1945)”, in: Helga Schrekenberger: Networks of Refugees from Nazis Germany , Leiden / Boston 2016, p. 86; Jan Friedmann / Jörg Später: "British and German collective debt debate", in: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): Wandlungsprozess in Westdeutschland , p. 60.
3. ^ Stefan Appelius: Heine: The SPD and The Long Way To Power , 1999, p. 223; Jörg Thunecke: "Fight for Freedom. A Vansittartist Network of Rightwing German Socialist in Great Britain (1941-1945)", in: Helga Schrekenberger: Networks of Refugees from Nazis Germany , Leiden / Boston 2016, p. 86.
4. ^ Glees: Exile Politics during the Second World War , p. 142.
5. ↑ Stefan Appelius: Heine: The SPD And The Long Way To Power , 1999, p. 260.
6. ↑ Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt: Ollenhauer: Biedermann and Patriot , 1984, p. 244.