Willi Bleicher

Willi Bleicher (; 27 October 1907 – 23 June 1981) was one of the best known and, according to at least one source, one of the most important and effective German trades union leaders of the post-war decades.

In 1965 Yad Vashem recognized Willi Bleicher as Righteous Among the Nations. This reflected Bleicher's wartime activities as a detainee at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was one of those who risked their lives to save a child prisoner called Stefan Jerzy Zweig. The boy grew up to become an author and film maker. Thanks to a novel first published in 1958, and based on those events, the episode became widely known and celebrated.

Life

Family provenance and early years The fifth of his parents' children, Willi Bleicher was born in Cannstatt, a small town on the north side of Stuttgart (into which it has subsequently been subsumed). His father, Paul Bleicher, worked as a machinist in the Daimler-Benz plant at nearby Untertürkheim. His mother, Wilhelmine Bleicher, was also employed, intermittently, for the company in their works canteen. There were eight in the family and Paul Bleicher's wages were barely sufficient to support them all: hunger was not unknown. However, he soon lost his job, probably in May 1928: it is unclear whether this was on account of his political activities or for some other reason. Dismissal by the largest employer in the area was not helpful to his career prospects. However, he obtained work for around a year with "Glasdach Zimmermann» of Untertürkheim. That came to an end on the middle of 1929 after which, until 1935, he was unemployed for most of the time, albeit with interludes of temporary work which included, for at least one stint, a chance to apply his bakery training.

In the 1970s Willi Bleicher recalled that his initial period in prison, which involved a lengthy period held in "investigative custody" in Stuttgart-Cannstatt, came in some ways as a relief:

"Ich war irgendwie mal froh, daß ich eine Bleibe hatte. Ich hatte die Emigration noch hautnah in Erinnerung, wo mich jeder lieber gehen als kommen sah. Wo ich mir jeden Tag die Frage stellte, ob ich den wieder hinter mich bringe, in einem Bett oder einem Dach. Hier hatte ich eine Zelle, die war warm, ich hatte Literatur und konnte viel lesen." Having tracked down the whereabouts of the child, Bleichner invited Stefan Jerzy Zweig – by this time aged 22 – to Stuttgart where the two were reunited. In 1964 they travelled together to what remained of the concentration camp and met up for the first time with Bruno Apitz, the writer whose "novel" had conferred an unanticipated level of international fame on both of them.

New beginnings and reconstruction During the final weeks of the war Willi Bleicher was identified as a co-organiser of a celebration undertaken to commemorate Ernst Thälmann, the communist leader whom the authorities had recently murdered at the camp. Bleicher was tortured and removed from Buchenwald to the Gestapo prison in Ichtershausen. Then, as the authorities raced to empty out the concentration camps and prisons in the east of the country ahead of the advancing Soviet troops, the Ichtershausen inmates were sent on a "death march" in the direction of the Erzgebirge (mountains) and the border with Czechoslovakia, which gave Bleicher one last chance to witness the deaths of more comrades, worn out with physical mistreatment and starvation. Bleicher, however, survived.

Civic administration was restored only slowly, under the leadership of Arnulf Klett whom the French military administrators had installed as the new city mayor. For his part, working sometimes in concert with the French troops and sometimes in conflict with them, Bleicher involved himself with the provisional works committees, generally set up under the leadership of former socialist party administrators who had put themselves forward as representatives of local opposition to the Nazis, and who set about providing basic support for the population and making a start on the necessary reconstruction work.

By the end of the 1950s, individual failures not withstanding, IG Metall could boast an impressive record on wages across Germany. The dock workers strike in Schleswig-Holstein had lasted for 16 weeks during 1956/57, but had paved the way for equal treatment of dockworkers with salaried employees in respect of wage levels and sickness absences. The 1956 "Bremen agreement" brought a reduction in the working week from 48 to 45 hours and was followed by a succession of follow-up agreements on other matters. These were steps towards the Bad Homburg agreement of 8 July 1960 and agreement progressively to reduce the working week to 40 hours by July 1965. At the same time, between 1950 and 1960 a substantial increase in "real money" (inflation adjusted) wage rates was achieved along with significant increases in holiday entitlement.

By the middle of April 1963 it had become clear that the union would not achieve an acceptable outcome simply by negotiating. The union executive now approved a strike vote in North Württemberg / North Baden and another in North Rhine-Westphalia where there was also a major concentration of heavy engineering companies with an IG Metall workforce. In both regions, nearly 90% of members voting endorsed the strike call, and on 29 April the Stuttgart-based regional union leadership called for a strike across the country. Around 100,000 took part: there were hardly any "strike breakers". The employers' side reacted just two days later with a lockout that affected around 300,000 workers and carried a clear message of their determination to break IG Metall financially as a way to preventing future strikes. Bleicher spoke in public of "a total war against the metal workers of this land" and of the "worst labour dispute for forty years". Memories were awakened of the Ruhr iron workers' strike of 1928 when employers had acted with uncompromising severity across Germany, seeking to break not merely the trades unions but also, many believed, to shake the democratic underpinnings of the state.

On 23 June 1981, Willi Bleicher died after a short illness. He was buried on 29 June at the Steinhalden cemetery, close to Cannstatt where he had been born. The occasion was marked by most workers in the metals sectors across the land who stopped work for a minute at 11 o'clock.