Willi Bleicher. Texte eines Widerständigen / Willi Bleicher. Texts of a resister

Willi Bleicher, born in 1907, was unemployed for many years during the period of the Great Depression. Yet he fought for a just world and against the brown menace. The Nazis destroyed his first great love; they imprisoned him in a concentration camp, where he resisted and did everything he could to ensure that a small child survived the camp. Despite torture, the SS and the Gestapo were unable to break him. A few years after the war, Bleicher was working in the executive leadership of Germany’s largest trade union, IG Metall. He was later demoted for political reasons and returned to grassroots work. In the 1960s, he became the most important strike leader in the Federal Republic of Germany and a key opponent of the former SS man Hanns Martin Schleyer, who headed the employers’ association. The book edited by Bleicher’s biographer Hermann G. Abmayr publishes, for the first time, Bleicher’s letters from the concentration camp, along with many of his speeches and important interviews.