Willy Hundertmark

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Willy Hundertmark (born April 16, 1907 in Apolda ; † December 15, 2002 in Bremen ) was a German KPD functionary and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

biography

At the age of 14, Hundertmark began an apprenticeship at Krupp in Essen . At the age of twelve he was already politically active and became a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD). In the KJVD, he soon rose to become the head of organization for the Ruhr district. In 1926 he joined the KPD . Due to the global economic crisis, Hundertmark was dismissed from Krupp in 1929 and then taken over as a full-time functionary by the KPD.

During the “Third Reich” Hundertmark was one of the politically persecuted of the National Socialist dictatorship. In the wake of the wave of arrests following the Reichstag fire , Willy Hundertmark was arrested on March 3, 1933 and taken to the Sonnenburg concentration camp . After his release in September 1933, he was arrested again three weeks later and was sent to the Brauweiler camp for more than three months . When he was released, he had to promise not to return to Essen. After staying in various cities, he came to Bremen in 1939.

After the end of the Second World War , Hundertmark was briefly (1945/46) a member of the SPD , then actively participated in the rebuilding of the KPD in Bremen. In mid-October 1946 he became editor, later editor-in-chief of the KPD party newspaper, which appeared from January 1947 as the “Tribune of Democracy”. The “Tribune of Democracy” was temporarily banned by the American military government in 1948 and had to contend with financial difficulties, so that it could not appear again until May 1949.

In April 1951 Hundertmark was temporarily banned from working by the KPD leadership in the course of the “ Tito debate” and dismissed as editor-in-chief of the party newspaper. During this time Hundertmark was active in his residential group in Gröpelingen , the largest district organization of the Bremen KPD, and in the trade union for trade, banks and insurance (HBV). On March 15, 1956, he was rehabilitated within the party and was allowed to resume his full-time function as a member of the KPD. After the KPD ban and illegal political work from 1956 to 1968, he joined the newly constituted DKP .

In addition to his work at the housing company GEWOBA , where he was a member of the works council from 1961 to 1972 , Hundertmark devoted himself to the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN), which he co-founded in 1947, in the years to come. In 1975 he became secretary of the VVN. From 1983 to 1991 he was chairman of the Bremen regional association of the VVN, then honorary chairman.

In 1986 he was awarded the Culture and Peace Prize of the Villa Ichon in Bremen. At the turn of the century, in 1989, Hundertmark was the first communist in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany to be awarded the " Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class" by President Richard von Weizsäcker . In 2002 he died in Bremen at the age of 95.

Willy Hundertmark was married to a sister of Gustav Böhrnsen .

Fonts (selection)

  • Hendrik Bunke (Ed.): Willy Hundertmark. Memories of a resistant life. Edition Temmen , Bremen 1997, ISBN 3-86108-323-X .
  • With Jakob Pfarr et al .: Antifascist resistance 1933 to 1945 in Bremen. Schmalfeldt-Verlag, Bremen 1974.
  • Anti-fascism versus anti-communism. The VVN in the Cold War. In: Christoph Butterwegge et al. (Ed.) Bremen during the Cold War. Contemporary witnesses report from the 50s and 60s: Western integration - rearmament - peace movement. Bremen 1991.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hundred marks, Willy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German KPD functionary
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Apolda
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 2002
Place of death Bremen