Winnig, August

(1878-1956)

   labor leader, politician, and writer; an erstwhile socialist expelled from the SPD for supporting the Kapp* Putsch. Born in Blankenburg am Harz to the family of a gravedigger, he apprenticed as a mason and was a trade-union* activist before 1900. He became deputy chairman of the construction union in 1913, the year he entered Hamburg's Burgerschaft (City Assembly). He joined the patriotic Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914 and sup-ported the SPD's right wing during the war (he was a soldier in 1915-1916); after he opposed the July 1917 Peace Resolution, he was tagged a "social im-perialist." During the November Revolution* (which he detested) he was em-issary to the Baltic provinces.* He became East Prussia's Oberpräsident after his election to the National Assembly.*

   Winnig soon nurtured ties with the Freikorps* and was steadily drawn to radical nationalism. After he supported Kapp in March 1920, Prussia* stripped him of his office and the SPD expelled him. He then settled in Potsdam, studied history and economics during 1922-1924, and was increasingly linked with neoconservatism. He was a contributor to the rightist Berliner Borsen-Zeitung; his essays supported Hugo Stinnes* while condemning an allegedly Jewish-inspired effort to foster class war among German workers. With Ernst Niekisch,* he resigned from the Young Socialist movement in 1925 to form the Wider-standsbewegung (Resistance Movement), a group identified with National Bol-shevism.* Again with Niekisch, he formed a splinter group in 1927 called the Alte Sozialistische Partei. Although he was an apologist for the Kaiserreich, his book Das Reich als Republik poignantly observed that "when the Republic took the place of the Monarchy, nobody opposed the Republic in order to die for the Monarchy." With Paul Lensch, another renegade socialist, he published the biweekly Der Firn, a journal that opposed communism while promoting na-tionalist revolution. Although Winnig joined the KVP in 1930, he was drawn to the NSDAP; in 1932 he described Nazism as "a German necessity." He was enthusiastic when Hitler* seized power, but failed to join the NSDAP and slowly became a Christian-conservative critic of the regime. His autobiographical writ-ings (e.g., Fruhrot) were examined by the Gestapo, but were not placed on an index of forbidden books.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Schumacher, M.d.R.; Von Klemperer, Germany's New Conservatism.