Heinrich Schmitt

Heinrich Schmitt (6 October 1895 – 13 August 1951) was a German politician. In 1928 he was elected to the national Reichstag, where he sat as a Communist member. In 1933 he escaped with his family to the Soviet Union. The next year he infiltrated back into Germany with false papers. He was arrested in 1935, but survived ten years in detention, re-emerging in 1945 as a leading regional politician in occupied Bavaria. He left the Communist party in 1947.

Life Heinrich Schmitt was born into a working-class family in Waldbüttelbrunn, a small town a short distance to the west of Würzburg. While his father went out to work his mother maintained a small-holding. Schmitt trained as a machinist and in 1913, the year of his eighteenth birthday, joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was conscripted into the army in 1915, but his military career was cut short by a head wound, and by the end of 1916 he was working for BASF in Ludwigshafen. In 1917 the SPD split, primarily over the issue of whether or not to continue supporting the country's participation in the war, and Schmitt switched to the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD / Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). As a political activist, Schmitt became known as a skilled and effective speaker. Having joined the works council at Leuna, he became its president in the mid-1920s, and was re-appointed to that post in 1928 and 1929 despite his increasing level of high-level political engagement outside the factory gates. and as General Secretary of the "International Rubber Industry Workers' Organisation". a newly created post. The creation of the office appears to have resulted from an initiative by the US occupation forces, and responsibilities included "denazification" ("Entnazifizierung "). He resigned his ministerial office in July 1946 and his Communist party membership on 19 October 1947. achieved notability on his own account, although his role was little publicised until after his death in 1999. During the Cold War, Harry Schmitt led the Ralf Forster Group, a secret military organisation sponsored by the East German party leadership which was seen as the military wing of the Communist Party in West Germany.