Karl Höltermann

Karl Höltermann (20 March 1894 – 3 March 1955) was a German Social Democratic activist, journalist and politician who served as the chairman of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold from 1931 until its forced dissolution in 1933. He also served as a member of the Reichstag (German parliament) for just over a year, from 1932 to 1933. By trade he started out as a typesetter, but after his wartime experiences he re-emerged as a successful party-political journalist.

Life Provenance and early years Karl Höltermann was born in Pirmasens, a town near the German border with France and Luxembourg known, then as now, a centre of Germany's shoe manufacturing industry. Sources describe his father as "a shoe maker and trade union functionary". He was still an infant when the family relocated to Nuremberg, where he grew up, and where he was apprenticed as a typesetter. Early on he joined the trade union and, a little later, the Social Democratic Party. The "Republikanischen Notwehr" was subsumed into the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold: Karl Höltermann became deputy chairman of the national organisation. He also took charge of setting up and running (on an unpaid basis He continued to serve until the banning of the organisation by the Nazi party, a move which came in the broader context of the cancellation of democracy in March 1933.

Parliament and the end of democracy In the Berlin district of Gropiusstadt a pathway named after Karl Höltermann provides pedestrian and cycle access to the maternity unit.

Between July 1932 and (notionally) June 1933 Karl Höltermann also sat in the Reichstag (national parliament), as an SPD member, representing Electoral District 10 . Several sources document other exiled German political refugees in London refer to a group of former German parliamentarians working with Höltermann, without spelling out the nature or extent of the group's activism. After 1942 Höltermann withdrew completely from any ongoing political engagement by the British-based exile community. Karl Höltermann remained in England until he died a couple of weeks short of what would have been his sixty-first birthday, on 3 March 1955.

Brother Karl Höltermann's younger brother was the Bavarian politician .