Willy Lange (party official)

Willy Lange (born May 20, 1899 in Oederan , † after 1949) was a German party functionary (SPD).

Life and activity

Lange, a trained sales clerk, initially worked as a cooperative employee after completing his training. From 1925 he held the post of district secretary of the SPD for the Chemnitz- Erzgebirge district. In addition, he took on tasks as a member of the sub-district executive committee of the workers' welfare and as a member of the Central Association of Employees (ZdA).

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Lange began building an independent, illegal SPD organization in Saxony in March 1933. Later that year he emigrated to Czechoslovakia. There he settled in Karlsbad , where in June he set up the border secretariat of Sopade, the party organization of the SPD in exile, which was banned in Germany, for Chemnitz, Zwickau and Leipzig.

In January 1935, Lange was dismissed from the Sopade border secretariat because he had pursued special organizational efforts. Instead, he joined the RSD under Böchel and Siegfried Aufhäuser and then continued his border work in the interests of the RSD with saved Saxon party money.

In October 1936 he was excluded from the RSD as part of the internal dissolution process. In the following years he worked with the Czechoslovak intelligence service and was naturalized in Czechoslovakia.

In Germany, Lange was expatriated and his expatriation was publicly announced in the Reichsanzeiger .

In 1939 Lange tried to emigrate to Great Britain under the name Frantisek Jellinek. He then went to Switzerland instead, where he allegedly worked with British intelligence. He lived at times under the name Harry Johnston in Zurich , Lucerne and Horn. In 1949 he went to Constance. He later lived in Switzerland again.

family

Lange was married to Marianne Naumann (* 1907).

literature

• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strass: Politics, economy, public life. 1980, p. 418.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp / Hans Georg Lehmann: The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger , 1985, p. 27.