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 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. Thanks to a novel first published in 1958, and based on those events, the episode became widely known and celebrated.
Life
Family provenance and early years 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 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.
The world of work 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. 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. 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. 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.
Politics 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.
Germany under Nazi dictatorship 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. Initially he was held in the local prison at Bad Cannstatt. Later he was transferred to a prison in Ulm and/or the concentration camp at Welzheim where treatment was far more brutal.
Buchenwald Bleicher was moved to the Buchenwald concentration camp in October 1938 and remained there almost all the time until national military defeat delivered liberation in May 1945. He was placed in "Block 37" with other "political detainees", learning early on about the chicanery and ill-treatment to be expected from the guards, although he also learned how to exploit the corrupt ones in order to smuggle in supplies. Bleicher became a member of the resistance group inside the camp and worked increasingly with other inmates who had been fellow members of the KPD-O, notably Ludwig Becker, Eugen Ochs und Robert Siewert.
The leader's 50th birthday was elaborately celebrated across Germany, and at Buchenwald some 2,300 inmates were freed. One of these had worked as a detainee-administrator ("Verwalter der Effektenkammer") and Bleicher, who had avoided overt disobedience or disorderly conduct, was appointed to take on the man's duties. Bleicher's position enabled him to ensure than the most needy detainees were given the clothes of those who had died, and he increasingly earned respect among fellow prisoners whom he organised with skill and compassion, supporting those who collapsed from the intensity of the physical work, thereby often rescuing these from certain death. His time at Buchenwald marked him deeply for the rest of his life. It also changed his personal future. Plans to marry Helene Beck, a friend whom he had known for eleven years, had to be abandoned after her final letter to him at the concentration camp, received in 1940, broke off their relationship.
In his 1958 novel Naked Among Wolves the East German writer Bruno Apitz told the story of how a three-year-old boy was rescued by a group of fellow inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1963 a film of the book appeared, directed by Frank Beyer. It turned out that this was no mere work of fiction. Shortly after the film release it became known that one of the main protagonists, portrayed in the film by Armin Mueller-Stahl, was modelled on Willi Bleicher, who had been the real life "Kapo" (prisoner-administrator) involved in the events depicted. Having tracked down the whereabouts of the child, Bleichner invited Stefan Jerzy Zweig – by this time aged 22 – to Stuttgart where the two were reunited. In 1964 they travelled together to what remained of the concentration camp and met up for the first time with Bruno Apitz, the writer whose "novel" had conferred an unanticipated level of international fame on both of them.
New beginnings and reconstruction During the final weeks of the war Willi Bleicher was identified as a co-organiser of a celebration undertaken to commemorate Ernst Thälmann, the communist leader whom the authorities had recently murdered at the camp. Bleicher was tortured and removed from Buchenwald to the Gestapo prison in Ichtershausen. Then, as the authorities raced to empty out the concentration camps and prisons in the east of the country ahead of the advancing Soviet troops, the Ichtershausen inmates were sent on a "death march" in the direction of the Erzgebirge (mountains) and the border with Czechoslovakia, which gave Bleicher one last chance to witness the deaths of more comrades, worn out with physical mistreatment and starvation. Bleicher, however, survived.
By May 1945 the Soviet and US leaders had already agreed postwar zones of occupation whereby Saxony and Thuringia would be administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. However, with the Soviets focusing their military attention on Berlin, it was actually members of the US 97th Infantry Division who liberated Willi Bleicher in the frontier region between Germany and Czechoslovakia. He managed to escape from a prisoner of war detention camp near Eger and return, first to Buchenwald, where he recovered his identity papers, and then to Stuttgart over several stages, one of which involved "jumping" a train. The journey provided his first chance to witness with his own eyes the devastation which the Nazis had left behind them. He reached Stuttgart in June 1945. The city was destroyed, with many of its inhabitants having escaped into the surrounding countryside. Approximately five million cubic meters of rubble covered the streets and squares. However, the psychological devastation was harder to bear than the physical destruction, and not just in Stuttgart.
Civic administration was restored only slowly, under the leadership of Arnulf Klett whom the French military administrators had installed as the new city mayor. For his part, working sometimes in concert with the French troops and sometimes in conflict with them, Bleicher involved himself with the provisional works committees, generally set up under the leadership of former socialist party administrators who had put themselves forward as representatives of local opposition to the Nazis, and who set about providing basic support for the population and making a start on the necessary reconstruction work.