Fritz Steinhoff

Fritz Steinhoff (23 November 1897 – 22 October 1969) was a German politician of the SPD. He was the third Minister President of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1956 to 1958. Early life Steinhoff was born in 1897 in a miner's family and grew up in Unna. He became a miner at the age of seventeen. Steinhoff was drafted into the Navy in 1917 and served on a torpedo boat until 1919. He returned to his job as a miner and joined the SPD. He belonged to a nationalistic section of the Young Socialists in the SPD. In 1922, he went to the European Academy of Work in the University of Frankfurt to hear lectures about business and politics from lectures such as Franz Oppenheimer. Due to unemployment, Steinhoff went to Berlin, where he worked and attended Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Career In 1926 he was a volunteer at the SPD party newspaper, Westfälische Allgemeine Volkszeitung (WAVZ), in Dortmund. A year later Steinhoff became managing director of newspaper distribution, and became the party secretary in Hagen. In the 1929 local elections, the SPD reached a majority, and Steinhoff was an honorary magistrate for Youth Sport Care and city gardening. 1933–1945 After the seizure of power by the Nazi Party, Steinhoff was arrested several times for vigorously opposing the party. He later worked at a stove and oven cleaning business from 1937 until his sentence in 1938, where Steinhoff was sentenced to three years in prison, due to smuggling the Vorwärts into Germany in 1934, after the banning of the newspaper in 1933.