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. In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he was sent to school where, as he later recalled, he was often unjustly beaten by his teachers, partly because he became "fed up with learning". He failed to achieve the required academic grades but displayed powerful leadership potential among his friends, for instance in football teams. At home fear of unemployment was a pressing theme. In 1920 he felt intensely the experience of threatened destitution when his father was temporarily unemployed in the course of a strike and lockout at the plant.