August Schmidt
* 1884

August Friedrich Schmidt was born on July 13th, 1884 in Königsaue near Quedlinburg in Saxony-Anhalt. After finishing elementary school, he worked there as a farmhand. He came to Hamburg in 1906, where he found work at a shipyard in the port; later, he got a job at the state docks.

In the city that had become a bastion of the Social Democrats in the course of the industrialization during the second half of the 19th century, he joined the SPD in 1907. In addition, he was a member of the Port Workers’ Union, one of Hamburg’s largest trade unions, along with the Transport Workers’ Union and the Sailors’ Association of Sailors. We know next to nothing about the following ten years of Schmidt’s life. It seems that he split with the SPD leadership during World War I over the issue of war bonds. At the end of the war, August Schmidt joined the USPD and for a time was one of its local leaders alongside Ernst Thälmann. At the end of 1920, Schmidt and most of the Hamburg USPD members followed Thälmann into the new communist party KPD.

The twenties were characterized by his engagement for the stevedores’ union and, from 1924, in the Rote Hilfe (“Red Aid”), an organization devoted to the material and moral support of imprisoned Communists and their families.

From 1927 to 1931, August Schmidt was a member of the Hamburg City Council, where he persistently campaigned for the improvement of the working conditions in the port and belonged to the Port Expansion Committee. He devoted most of his effort to the concerns of the port workers, advocated the increased use of modern equipment, better ventilation of the sheds, the development of staff canteens and sanitary facilities. In addition, he was a member of the grievance committee for the housing agency, which became a further focus of his parliamentary activity.

From the end of the 1920s, Schmidt was one of the main organizers of the “Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition” (Revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsopposition, RGO) who aimed to restore the influence of the KPD in the works councils and the workers’ associations lost during the period of economic and political stabilization by a radical “leftist” policy. On orders from the “Red Trade Union Internationale”, they tried to widen the base for the battle against the “Social Democratic main enemy”, with the object to split the Social Democratically oriented trade unions with their 4.8 million members joined in the ADGB, the General Association of German Trade Unions.

With the newly founded “United German Association of Seamen, Stevedores and Inland Sailors” (Einheitsverband der Seeleute, Hafenarbeiter und Binnenschiffer Deutschlands) Schmidt helped organize spontaneous strikes in the Port. After the hard crackdown by the police, Schmidt fiercely attacked Adolph Schönfelder, the Social Democratic Police Chief, in the City Council.

After the de facto banning of the KPD by the decree of February 28th, 1933 in the aftermath of the burning of the Reichstag building, Schmidt continued his political work underground. Until his arrest on September 17th, 1935, he headed the illegal KPD district chapter in Hamburg-Winterhude. After several months of remand, he was sentenced to two years in prison in 1936.

The exact circumstances of Schmidt’s death on August 3rd, 1939 remain unclear. According to oral reports, he died from the results of mistreatment suffered in prison following his release.

Translation by Peter Hubschmid 2018
© Text by courtesy of the Hamburg City Council, excerpted from: Jörn Lindner/Frank Müller: "Mitglieder der Bürgerschaft – Opfer totalitärer Verfolgung", 3rd revised and augmented edition, Hamburg 2012

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.