Willi Bleicher – class struggle instead of monument

On the 80th anniversary of the destruction of National Socialism, this year once again became clear how much the anti -fascists were missing today, which were in resistance and could report on their time in illegality, in exile and mostly in the fascist concentration camps. It was just a small number of men and women, who impressed numerous young people in the FRG and contributed to the fact that they themselves became anti -fascists. Willi Bleicher was one of these inspiring people. It is also due to the fact that he is almost forgotten today because he died in 1981 at the age of 74. It is therefore extremely meritorious that the historian Hermann G. Abmayr in the butterfly publishing house under the title “Texts of a resistant” has now published and politically published writings by Bleicher on over 450 pages.

From auxiliary worker to resistance

Abmayr had already dealt with the biography of Willi Bleicher 40 years ago and in 1992 the book “We don’t need a monument-Willi Bleicher: The workers’ leader and his heirs” published, which was out of print for a long time and was now being reissued as an e-book. Even the title makes it clear what has changed in the past 30 years: Blicher’s heirs and pupils, such as Eugen Loderer and Franz Steinkühler, are already forgotten or – like the inventor of the capital -driven pension, Walter Riester – took a political way that the life -long Marxist Bleicher would not defend. Bleicher was known 30 years ago with the saying that also became the title of the film portrait about him: “You should never bend down in front of a living person.”

In “Texts of a Research” there is a speech of Blicher to award the Carl von Ossietzky Prize in 1978, in which he went into the background of this sentence: “I did not love to bend down my school teacher, who ordered me as a seven-year-old boy, so that the cane not only caused pain to my hint, but also my childish mind. So I learned the knowledge of which means and methods people are used to do. “

Bleicher, born in 1907, had not been an intellectual. He was initially a auxiliary worker, only in the baker in the metal industry. After 1945 he was a official of IG Metall in Baden-Württemberg and was one of the left unionists with a communist background. And for him, too, workers tend to leave few written certificates: on the first 100 pages the letters are printed, which Bleicher wrote from the different Nazi prisons and then the concentration camp beech forest to different family members. It becomes clear that he was not allowed to comment on political questions. Rather, he asks to eat something or “the washing”, which means Swabian clean laundry. Almost in all letters, he emphasizes that he is doing well and that the addressee shouldn’t worry.

How he really did is showing that Bleicher ended the birthday greetings to his mother in 1936 with the hope that he would be home next year. In 1939 he could only write that he had already expressed this wish so often and that he had not yet come true. The worst time of his captivity should still come. In the collected texts, Abrayr published an interview that Bleicher led in 1973 with television journalist Klaus Ullrich. The latter planned a Bleicher biography that has never come to. The tape found in the estate of Ullrich with the conversation is published here for the first time. Bleicher describes how he deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp after serving his prison sentence and became part of the communist resistance movement. He also did not spare him spared the deleted kidnapping into the bunker and the death marches in the last few weeks of the NS.

Disappointment and unity

However, the interview also impresses because Bleicher gives deep insight into the life of a worker family in the first decades of the 20th century. The young Bleicher experienced the school as an authoritarian drill institution. “What were the teachers? These were non -commissioned officers, «says one of his texts. But it also becomes clear how important Bleicher was appropriation of education at a young age. In the Communist Youth Association, he gained books and founded a reading group on the history of the workers’ movement. Bleicher describes how he got into the course of the KPD under Thälmann in opposition and organized himself in the communist opposition, which arose early on for a great alliance of the workers’ parties against the growing NS and was also based on the unity in union policy.

But also with the KPO, Bleicher not only had positive experiences. He reports that he was rejected by comrades on the run from persecution without money and contacts in a French city. He later learned that he was thought to be a lace of the NS due to an intra -party intrigue – a drastic experience that Bleicher is still remembered 50 years later: »That was on Whit Monday 1934. That was the worst thing I took over over the years. I can very remember that I played for the first time with the idea of ​​suicide. «

Against every Nazism

Despite an impending arrest, Bleicher decided to go back to Germany. Contrary to the disappointments, he continued his work in the illegal KPO until his arrest in 1936. It was only in April 1945 that he was released by the US Army. He returns to Stuttgart and, like many resistance fighters, immediately falls back into the political work in IG Metall and the KPD, from which he escaped in 1950. The unity of the workers’ movement is particularly important to him from the experience with the rise of the Nazi movement.

In the second half of the book, in addition to an interview with Erasmus Schöfer and Erhard Korn, various speeches from Bleicher are published at union congresses. Often it is only short reports in which it is quoted. Here he also occasionally expresses self -criticism about a trade union bureaucracy that is increasingly integrating into capitalism. After leaving all union functions when reaching the retirement age, Bleicher had a few more years to act on anti -fascist demonstrations or award ceremonies. These speeches are also documented. He spoke up when old SS men gathered to meet comradeship meetings, and he warned of all forms of neo-Nazism. He not only saw the danger on the right. In particular, the chancellor candidacy of the CSU lawyer Franz Josef Strauß, who is known to have the best contacts to fascists at home and abroad, was for Bleicher event warnings of a new form of fascism.

Here he took the point of view as a Marxist, who saw a form of rule of capital in the Nazi movement as in all fascisms and who was convinced that only a worker movement that was on the ground of the class struggle could prevent fascism. He also clearly spoke of the historical failure of the workers’ movement in Germany. He even called for a creed of the workers class in Germany that, unlike in Austria and Spain, she had captured without a fight before fascism.

Early he also commented on the re -strengthening anti -Semitism. Because he had hidden the Jewish boy Jerzy Zweig from deportation in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Bleicher was honored in 1965 in the Israeli memorial Yad Vaschem as a just among the peoples. It is good that Absmay is reminiscent of an anti -fascist trade unionist who does not need a monument – working on a contemporary left -wing worker organization would be the greatest honor for him.

Hermann G. Abmayr (ed.): Willi Bleicher. Texts of a resistant. Letters from the concentration camp, speeches and interviews. Butterfly-Verlag 2025, 460 p., Br., 24.80 €.