Walter Wolfgang
SHORTLY BEFORE he died, Walter Wolfgang was asked by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to record a message on his phone. “The objective of the Labour party and the peace movement is a peaceful world without exploitation,”he said. The Holocaust survivor, who has died at the age of 95, joined the Labour party in 1948 on becoming a naturalised British citizen, full of altruistic certainties about the rights of man. He became a keen Corbyn supporter. Would he have changed his views in light of the current furore over antisemitism in his party? We shall never know.
But what we do know is that having experienced Nazism in Frankfurt until he escaped as a teenager, Wolfgang was not afraid to speak his mind, as a committed, die-hard socialist, a life-long peace advocate and founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
He triggered a media frenzy in 2005 when he heckled former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw who was defending Britain’s role in the Iraq war at the Labour Party conference. As Straw spoke of “nation-building from a violent past,” the 82 year old Wolfgang shouted: “Nonsense!” and was manhandled out of the conference. He was briefly detained under terrorism laws, but allowed back the following day.
Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, told the BBC ‘s Radio 4 Today programme that he should not have been removed. Party chairman Ian McCartney argued on Newsnight the conference had the right to expel repeated hecklers, but publicly apologised the next day.
“When you have an international debate that does not deal adequately with the international issues of the day, the least you can do, if someone is talking nonsense, is say so,” Wolfgang said.
A devout Jew, Wolfgang saw links between his religious and political views: ‘I came to understand the spiritual side of human existence through the Hebrew prophets. I was influenced by the idea that a society which doesn’t care for the disadvantaged ultimately decays and I began to articulate the notion that western civilisation had taken a wrong turn. I believe that western civilisation has yet to be realised.’”
He called for full employment, public ownership, the extension of trade union rights, a peace policy based on negotiations, global nuclear disarmament and free discussion on justice for Palestinians.
Wolfgang was born to Jewish parents in Frankfurt in 1923, a year before the city’s first Jewish mayor, Ludwig Landmann was elected. But by 1937 he fled to Britain, as a teenage refugee and studied at Ottershaw College, Chertsey. His parents’ business in Germany was confiscated, and his father was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. They managed to escape and join him in Britain two years later but were interned as enemy aliens. They eventually settled in Richmond, but his father’s health deteriorated and he died in 1945.
Wolfgang volunteered to serve in the Royal Air Force during the Second World
War but was rejected for a physical condition. He later qualified as an accountant.
On joining the Labour Party he became Secretary of the Bevanite pressure group, ‘Victory for Socialism’ from 1955 to 1958. He wrote or co-authored several socialist pamphlets including In Pursuit of Peace (1954) and The Red Sixties (1959).
Wolfgang stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate for Croydon North East in the 1959 general election. He was prevented from standing again due to his anti-nuclear views. But he dedicate d the rest of his life to that cause, and was made CND vice-president for life.
In the late 1970s Wolfgang was a leading member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, which urged reforms to the Labour Party structure to give constituency parties more power. In 2006, he was elected as a Grassroots Alliance candidate standing for election to the
Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, campaigning against the Iraq war, and rejecting the Royal Navy’s Trident missile programme. He served on Labour’s national executive committee and last year was also made a patron of the Stop the War coalition.
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey tweeted: “I’m saddened to hear of the death of Walter Wolfgang, 70 years a Labour Party member, lifelong socialist and man of peace who had no trouble calling out the Iraq war lies.” Another tweet described him as a “true hero.”
Wolfgang supported Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to become leader in 2015. He never married, but cared for his mother until she died.
GLORIA TESSLER
Walter Wolfgang: born June 23, 1923. Died May 28, 2019