Robert Neddermeyer (3 April 1887 in Altona18 October 1965 in Potsdam) was a German political activist and Communist politician.
Life
Early years
Neddermeyer was born in the Altona district of Hamburg during the final years of the Bismarck era. His father was a port worker and a sailor. On leaving school his early work included periods both at sea and, as a building worker and later on the railways and as a Hamburg telegraph operator, on land. He became a trades unionist in 1901 and in 1904 he joined the Social Democratic Party.
He interrupted his work with the telegraph service for a period of service in the navy between 1909 and 1912, and then served in the navy again during the First World War. He was an active participant in the Kiel mutiny which kicked off the German Revolution of 1918–19.
Weimar years
During the 1914/18 war the political left in Germany split, primarily over the issue of support for the war, and following the foundation of what later became known as the Weimar republic, Neddermeyer joined the newly formed German Communist Party (KPD). In the autumn of 1921 he underwent a political training course at the Party School in Berlin, and then between 1922 and 1926 served as party secretary to various regional Communist Party Associations, including a period at Bielefeld in 1923 when he took on a regional leadership party function.
1924 began as a crisis year, with inflation out of control and acute economic hardship widespread. There were two national elections in a single year. At the first of these, in May, Robert Neddermeyer was elected as a KPD member of the National Reichstag in Weimar. Communist party support nationally fell back later in the year after the reparations issue was partially addressed and the economy began to stabilise, but Neddermeyer held on to his own Reichstag seat until 1928. In 1924 he had also participated in the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern. Following the death of Lenin and his successor's change of strategy, the German Communist party became riven with internal divisions of its own. In 1925 Neddermeyer sided unambiguously with the so-called "ultra-left" faction.
On leaving the National Assembly in 1928 Neddermeyer was promptly elected to the Regional Assembly in Prussia, where he sat as a member continuously till 1933. Meanwhile, in 1930 he also became the owner of a small poultry farm near Liebenwalde, which he held on to till 1945, while also working as a poultryman for other farmers in the area. In 1930 he also found time to become a city councillor in Königsberg, another office which he retained till 1933. In 1931 he established the Revolutionary Agricultural Workers' Association of East Prussia (Revolutionären Landarbeiterverband Ostpreußen), becoming the organisation's first chairman.
Nazi years
In January 1933 the Nazi Party seized power and rapidly put an end to multi-party democratic government. Neddermeyer became part of the (necessarily underground) illegal Communist resistance in Germany. His activities included editing "Socialist Republic", an underground newspaper based in Cologne with a circulation of between 1,000 and 2,000 copies per edition.
On account both of his Communist past and of his resistance activities, between 1933 and 1945 Neddemeyer frequently found himself arrested and placed in prisons or concentration camps. He was interned in concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and at Esterwegen. On 18 July 1944 he was arrested as a member of the Anton Saefkow group and on 6 October 1944 sentenced to three years in prison, but his sentence was cut short in April 1945 when he was released from the prison at Brandenburg-Görden as the war ended.
