Willy Jesse

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Willy Jesse (born December 14, 1897 in Rostock , † August 17, 1971 in Eutin ) was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and co-founder of the SPD in Mecklenburg after the Second World War.

Life

Willy Jesse was born the son of a worker. He grew up on Ottostraße in the Kröpeliner-Tor-Vorstadt . After attending primary school, an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer followed. Then he went on a journey . In 1912 he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) and in 1915 the SPD. From 1915 to 1918 he did military service. In 1920 Willy Jesse became the editor of the newsletter of the Socialist Workers Youth Mecklenburg. From 1927 he was a full-time party functionary, in 1931 his work began as secretary of the SPD district of Mecklenburg-Lübeck in Rostock. He was a member of the central party committee of the SPD. From 1927 to 1933 Willy Jesse sat for the SPD in the city council in Rostock, 1932/33 he was a member of the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Schwerin .

After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 Willy Jesse was because of his membership in the SPD and its negative attitude towards the Nazis in so-called protective custody taken. After the SPD was banned, he worked as a grocer in a shop on Barnstorfer Weg after his release . He was in contact with Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber . In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but because of his age he was spared a frontline assignment. In 1944 he managed to escape to Sweden .

In September 1945 Willy Jesse returned to Rostock and was initially involved in the rebuilding of the OP party as state secretary and deputy chairman. Despite considerable resistance from the SPD, the merging of the KPD and SPD into the SED could not be prevented. Willy Jesse was friends with the chairman of the West SPD, Kurt Schumacher , whom he occasionally met secretly in West Berlin. It was also Schumacher who advised him “to remain in function and office as long as nothing is expected of [him] that a social democrat should be ashamed of” . For a short time he held the function of a parity state secretary of the SED and moved up to the party executive committee of the SED. In this way he tried to give the Social Democrats influence in the SED.

In July 1946, Willy Jesse was arrested by the Interior Ministry of the USSR (NKVD) and imprisoned until 1950 without charge or judgment in the Hohenschönhausen State Security Pretrial Detention Center. After a long-distance judgment in the USSR, Willy Jesse was sentenced to ten years of forced labor because he was allegedly a “Schumacher agent” and deported to the prison camp in Taischet, Siberia, on Lake Baikal . He was not allowed to have contact with relatives. Wilhelm Pieck later stated that Jesse had worked for the British secret service. In 1954 Willy Jesse returned to Rostock and went to West Germany in the same year because of the hopelessness for his political goals. Until 1964, Willy Jesse was head of the department for work groups in Bonn and editor of the magazine Arbeit und Freiheit .

Willy Jesse committed suicide on August 17, 1971.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Grete Grewolls: Who was who in Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania. The dictionary of persons . Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2011, ISBN 978-3-356-01301-6 , p. 4643 .
  2. ↑ Grit Stunnak: Willy Jesse. In: Contemporary history regional: messages from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Volume 1, Koch, Rostock 1997, p. 36.
  3. ↑ Beatrix Bouvier goes off in her work ! Social Democrats in the Soviet Zone and the GDR 1945–1953 . Bonn 1996, assuming that Jesse was released directly to West Germany.
personal data
SURNAME Jesse, Willy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, SED)
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Rostock
DATE OF DEATH 17th August 1971
Place of death Eutin