Robert Neddermeyer

Robert Neddermeyer (3 April 1887 in Altona18 October 1965 in Potsdam) was a German political activist and Communist politician.

Life

Early years Neddermeyer was born in the Altona district of Hamburg during the final years of the Bismarck era. His father was a port worker and a sailor. On leaving school his early work included periods both at sea and, as a building worker and later on the railways and as a Hamburg telegraph operator, on land. He became a trades unionist in 1901 and in 1904 he joined the Social Democratic Party. Communist party support nationally fell back later in the year after the reparations issue was partially addressed and the economy began to stabilise, but Neddermeyer held on to his own Reichstag seat until 1928.

On account both of his Communist past and of his resistance activities, between 1933 and 1945 Neddemeyer frequently found himself arrested and placed in prisons or concentration camps. He was interned in concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and at Esterwegen. On 18 July 1944 he was arrested as a member of the Anton Saefkow group and on 6 October 1944 sentenced to three years in prison, but his sentence was cut short in April 1945 when he was released from the prison at Brandenburg-Görden as the war ended.

The Soviet occupation zone / East Germany In 1945 Robert Neddermeyer served briefly as the mayor of Liebenwalde, the town near to which he still owned a small chicken farm. Between 1945 and 1946, he was Deputy Administrator of the important Niederbarnim region, subsequently renamed. In parallel to this he also served as District High Commissioner in Bernau. He was also de facto chairman of the Brandenburg State Land Commission and Brandenburg regional secretary (later chairman) of the Peasants' Mutual Aid Association (VdgB / Vereinigung der gegenseitigen Bauernhilfe). The VdgB had some of the features of a political party. East Germany is generally identified as a one party state because one party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) monopolised power. But there were other parties - for most of the time five - with fixed quotas of seats in the National Legislative Assembly (Volkskammer), were organised into a single Bloc party. This was controlled, along with other "mass organisations" by the ruling SED (party) through an institution called the (East German) National Front. The VdgB was one of the mass organisations included in the National Front and which also, from 1953 till 1960 (and again after 1986) had seats in the Volkskammer.

Neddermeyer succeeded Richard Kramer as secretary of the VdgB in March 1947, continuing in this position for approximately eighteen months. He then, in 1949, briefly served as the organisation's chairman. He also, in 1948, became a member of the Brandenburg Regional Assembly where between 1950 and 1952 he sat on the Agriculture and Forestry Committee. His career in the Brandenburg assembly came to an end when the Brandenburg assembly was dissolved as part of a wider reconfiguration of regional government. Much power passed now to Berlin, while residual powers of the regional assemblies were transferred to District Assemblies: in 1952 Richard Neddermeyer became a member of the Potsdam District Assembly.

Publications Landarbeiter im Kampf gegen Barone, Nazis und Bonzen!, 1932. (Communist Party election material) Es Begann in Hamburg. Ein Deutscher Kommunist Erzählt aus Seinem Leben, Berlin 1980. (quasi-autobiography (ghost-)written and edited by Martha Born und Heinz Heitzer :posthumously published by Karl Grünberg)