European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I am a trained typesetter and typographer.

After 1945 I was active in the socialistic youth as a state and federation secretary.

For 25 years I was the head of the German Union of Peace

and then federation spokesman for the Association of the victims of persecution by the Nazi regime.

If you grew up in a family of a labour union official, in the German populated areas of Czechoslovakia

during the twenties and thirties, of the last century,

you encountered the political problems and the political fights from early childhood.

In Eger my father was the most popular strike-leader before the First World War

and afterwards he was, although not fit for work,

still speaker at demonstrations and meetings of the union.

As his son, I obviously experienced this first hand, because my parents often took me with them to political activities;

especially on the 1st May or on other red-letter days of the labour movement.

The moulding and forming impressions were: 1. the year 1933,

when the German corpus and the German General staff shifted the power towards the Nazi leading clique

and: 2. the year 1934, in Austria,

when the latter gave power to the cleric-fascists who broke up the labour movement.

According to our understanding the development of mankind goes from lower forms to increasing forms of living together,

therefore that was obviously a heavy setback.

The German labour movement was the strongest and ideologically most consolidated one in the ‘1st Internationale’,

and you could say the same about the Austrian labour movement.