Hans Westermann
* 1890

The political vita of Hans Westermann, a member of the Hamburg city parliament who changed from Social Democracy to the German Communist Party (KPD), is marked by the controversies that his political pragmatism triggered at the end of the 1920s within the radicalized and dogmatized KPD. His eventually failed attempt to bring the KPD closer to Social Democracy reflects the entire tragedy that emerged from the division of the workers’ parties for the fate of the workers’ movement, for its leading representatives, but ultimately also for the Weimar state as a whole. Westermann’s fight against the party leadership’s dogmatic lack of reality spoke to the manifestation of political haphazardness, which could only be concealed with difficulty behind the veil of the cult of personality pursued by the German Communist Party, too.

Hans Westermann was born in Hamburg on 17 July 1890. There, he attended the eight-grade elementary school (Volksschule) and subsequently learned the tailoring trade. His political career began in 1910 when he joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Westermann, who held various honorary party positions in the following years, was a member of the left wing of the Hamburg Social Democrats.

At the beginning of the war in Aug. 1914, Westermann was drafted into the Imperial Navy. He was deployed in the mine clearance flotilla, which sent him to the Kiel Sailors’ Council (Marinerat) in November 1918. Westermann supported the goal of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – USPD) and the Spartacists to establish a council system based on the Russian model in Germany after the fall of the monarchy. Disappointed by the attitude of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – MSPD), which rejected the anti-parliamentary concept of the Left Socialists and finally made possible the transition to the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic in cooperation with the old elites of the Kaiserreich, Hans Westermann joined the KPD in 1919.

As early as 1921, he became full-time party secretary of the Hamburg KPD. He was responsible for the trade union work of his party and coordinated the so-called “works council movement” in this function. He did not take an active part in the KPD-backed uprisings of 1921 and 1923. After the death of Friedrich Ebert in 1925, Hans Westermann saw the opportunity and necessity to put his party’s relationship with Social Democracy on a new footing. In view of Hindenburg’s nomination for the second round of the presidential elections as a candidate of the political Right united in the “Reich Bloc” (“Reichsblock”), Westermann and a significant minority of his fellow party members favored the nomination of a joint candidate of the workers parties. To this end, they were prepared to dispense with Ernst Thälmann’s token candidacy. On this score, Westermann came into sharp conflict with the party leadership, which removed him from all party offices and excluded him from the party because of “deviation to the right.” Only after the Executive Committee of the Communist International’s (ECCI) “Open Letter” in Aug. 1925 had clearly rejected the ultra-left in the party and called on the German Communists to unite internally, was Westermann reinstated into the party without, however, regaining his offices.

In the following years, Westermann remained an exponent of a group that did not wish to have contact to the SPD break off, hoping to influence the political development of the Weimar state along the lines of the working class in a common approach of both workers parties – they were later called the “conciliator faction” (“Versöhnler”). Westermann was supported above all by his life companion Käthe Latzke, who came to the KPD in 1924 via the “Young Communist League.” From 1926 until her expulsion from the party in 1930, she worked as an employee in the “Red Aid” (“Rote Hilfe”) office in Hamburg.

In 1927, Hans Westermann was reinstated into the KPD district leadership and in the same year elected to the Hamburg City Parliament as one of 27 KPD deputies. Among other things, he was a member of the joint “Committee for the Fixing of Rents” (“Ausschuss zur Festsetzung der Mieten”) and for the preparation of development plans as well as the “Grievance Committee for the Housing Department” (“Beschwerdeausschuss für das Wohnungsamt”).

Only a few weeks after Thälmann had set the German Communists, at the “II Reich Party Conference,” on an “ultra-left,” i.e., a radical course renouncing pragmatic positions and radically combating the state structure and especially the parties and trade unions, Westermann harshly criticized the party chairman at a Hamburg district workers’ conference at the end of Nov. 1928. In his main presentation, Thälmann himself had also explained and supported the resolutions of the “VIth ECCI World Congress” before the district workers’ conference. This prompted Westermann to call for a partial amendment of the resolution supporting the ECCI decisions presented by the Hamburg district management. According to a police report, the “great unrest” that resulted could only be remedied with difficulty by the chairman of the meeting, the “pole conductor” (“Polleiter”) at the time, Grube. The district leadership then countered and accused Westermann of dishonesty and opportunism. This was successful, because the party leader, who was severely battered after the “Wittorf Affair” and was therefore intent on a unanimous vote, received an overwhelming majority for his resolution corresponding to the ECCI line, despite the objections raised by Westermann. Nevertheless, the resolutions of the VIth ECCI World Congress were to result in serious disputes among the membership in several districts, in the course of which around 50 functionaries were excluded from the party in the “Wasserkante” District and around 120 lost their party functions.

Westermann’s refusal to support the Stalinization that began in 1928 and the associated intensification of the struggle of the “Revolutionary Union Opposition” (“Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts-Opposition” – RGO) against the “free trade unions,” now also defamed as “social Fascists,” led to his renewed exclusion from the party in 1930. In Feb. 1930, he resigned his seat as a member of the Hamburg City Parliament.

Also after 1930, Westermann was active in the “conciliators’ group” (“Versöhnlergruppe”), with the “rightist deviationists (“Rechtsabweichler”), excluded from the Hamburg KPD, coming together in the so-called “Westermann Group” (“Westermann-Gruppe”) named after its leader. Ideologically, this group continued to follow the line of the 1925 “Open Letter,” in which the ECCI had called for the formation of company cells and cooperation in the “free trade unions.” Apparently, the group had some sympathy among workers, because at the KPD district party conference in 1932, the district leadership felt compelled to warn explicitly against the “carryings-on of the renegade Westermann.” Just how hardened the fronts were in the final phase of the Weimar Republic is shown by the fact that the party leadership still expressed these warnings even after the KPD’s ban.

Hans Westermann was arrested for the first time in June 1933 and kept in “protective custody” (“Schutzhaft”) for seven months. Faced with persecution, he and parts of his group rejoined the KPD organization, by then operating illegally, and took part in the underground work. On the night of 5/6 Mar. 1935, numerous members of the “Westermann Group,” including Westermann himself, were arrested. Only a few days later, Hans Westermann was murdered by Nazis in Fuhlsbüttel on 16 Mar. 1935. His wife Käthe Latzke died on 31 Mar. 1945 in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Author(s)/copyright: Text courtesy of the City Parliament of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (ed.), taken from: Jörn Lindner/Frank Müller: Mitglieder der Bürgerschaft – Opfer totalitärer Verfolgung, 3rd revised and expanded edition, Hamburg 2012.

Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.