Willi Bleicher

Willi Bleicher (27 October 1907 – 23 June 1981) was one of the best known and, according to at least one source, one of the most important and effective German trades union leaders of the post-war decades.

In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he was sent to school where, as he later recalled, he was often unjustly beaten by his teachers, partly because he became "fed up with learning".

He failed to achieve the required academic grades but displayed powerful leadership potential among his friends, for instance in football teams.

At home fear of unemployment was a pressing theme.

In 1920 he felt intensely the experience of threatened destitution when his father was temporarily unemployed in the course of a strike and lockout at the plant.

His experiences as a school boy in wartime and his father's experiences at the car factory turned him against the idea of factory work: in 1923 Bleicher embarked on a traineeship as a baker.

In 1925 he joined the German Food and Confectionery Workers' Association, a forerunner of the Food, Beverages and Catering Union ("Gewerkschaft Nahrung-Genuss-Gaststätten" / NGG).

Within the union he was appointed to a position as "youth leader" in 1926.

Around this time he also joined the Young Communists and the Communist Party.

It was probably in 1927 that he joined the German Metal Workers' Union ("Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband" / DMV).

However, he soon lost his job, probably in May 1928: it is unclear whether this was on account of his political activities or for some other reason.

Dismissal by the largest employer in the area was not helpful to his career prospects.

However, he obtained work for around a year with "Glasdach Zimmermann» of Untertürkheim. That came to an end on the middle of 1929 after which, until 1935, he was unemployed for most of the time, albeit with interludes of temporary work which included, for at least one stint, a chance to apply his bakery training.

In terms of his political activities, in 1929 he found himself excluded from the Communist Party because of his criticism of the hardline position taken by the leadership and of the "democratic deficit" within the party.

The Communist Party in Germany had close links to the party in Moscow, and Bleicher's exclusion was part of a wave of party expulsions by the party bosses in Berlin which mirrored similar developments imposed by an increasingly nervous and intolerant leadership in the Kremlin.

In Germany those expelled created a new alternative communist party, known as the Communist Party (Opposition) ("Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Opposition)" / KPD-O), and by the end of 1929 Willi Bleicher was also a KPD-O member, his name appearing in connection with numerous party offices – active and perhaps in some cases merely honorary – notably concerning the party's youth wing locally.

It seems likely that among the politically active he was becoming well known in the Stuttgart area as an energetic party organiser: that was certainly reflected a few years later in evidence provided at his politicised trial, after the Nazi takeover.

He was also backing the policies of the Revolutionary Trades Union Opposition ("Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition" / RGO)) movement.

In January 1933 the Nazi party took power and lost little time in transforming the country into a one- party dictatorship.

Activity likely to be interpreted as political activity became illegal, and more overtly after the Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933, those with a political record that involved the Communist Party were of particular interest to the security services.

Starting in March 1933 Willi Bleicher lived in Stuttgart, constantly changing his place of residence.

Like many on the political left he worked in a tight-knit group against the injustices of the system, involving himself in the production and distribution of illegal antifascist leaflets.

Looking back later he would always remember the intensity of the political desolation which many experienced at the time.

In May 1933 he fled across the frontier to Schaffhausen, and by a series of further steps crossed France to the Saarland which, for historical reasons, was still free of Nazi control because it was still under foreign military occupation.

In 1934 or 1935 he returned to Stuttgart, integrating himself back into the underground resistance activities in the region.

Sources differ over the order in which events unfolded in the run up to Bleicher's arrest.

A plausible chronology is that by 1936 he had been betrayed to the authorities by a government spy in the resistance group with which he was associated.

The group was broken up and on 3 January 1936 he was arrested by the Gestapo while working on the site of the Daimler-Benz plant.

In November 1936, accused of endangering national security and preparing to commit high treason, he was sentenced to a thirty-month prison term.

After 1945, as a leading trades unionist in the Metal Workers' Union, Bleicher saw to it that very few people knew he had as a young man trained and qualified as a baker.

There are suggestions that it might have been considered inappropriate to his image.

Thanks to a novel first published in 1958, and based on those events, the episode became widely known and celebrated.

The fifth of his parents' children, Willi Bleicher was born in Cannstatt, a small town on the north side of Stuttgart (into which it has subsequently been subsumed).

His father, Paul Bleicher, worked as a machinist in the Daimler-Benz plant at nearby Untertürkheim.

His mother, Wilhelmine Bleicher, was also employed, intermittently, for the company in their works canteen.

There were eight in the family and Paul Bleicher's wages were barely sufficient to support them all: hunger was not unknown.

In 1965 Yad Vashem recognized Willi Bleicher as Righteous Among the Nations.

This reflected Bleicher's wartime activities as a detainee at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was one of those who risked their lives to save a child prisoner called Stefan Jerzy Zweig.

The boy grew up to become an author and film maker.

For many colleagues and interlocutors it was only in 1992, several years after his death, that they learned of his baking qualifications from a biographical book by Hermann G. Abmayr In 1927 Willi Bleich took work at the Daimler-Benz plant, working initially as a casual worker in the sales office and then joining the permanent payroll as an assistant in the foundry.