Willi Bleicher
| Willi Bleicher | |
|---|---|
| Born | 27 October 1907 Cannstadt, Württemberg, Germany |
| Died | 23 June 1981 Stuttgart, West Germany |
| Occupation | Trades Union negotiator and leader |
| Known for | his effectiveness as a negotiator and for being the basis for a character in Naked Among Wolves |
| Spouse(s) | Anneliese Metz |
| Children | 1. Gerhard 2. Ingeborg |
| Parent(s) | Paul & Wilhelmine 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 postwar 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.
The fifth of his parents' children, Willi Bleicher was born in Cannstadt, 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.
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, till 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.
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