Sender, Toni (also Tony)

Trade unionist, politician, resistance fighter

Born: 29.11.1888 in Biebrich am Rhein

Died: 26.06.1964 in New York

The merchant's daughter Sidonie Zippora, whose first name was entered in the Biebrich registry office, rebelled against the authoritarian and conservative educational norms of her Jewish parents at an early age. After she had managed to attend a commercial school in Frankfurt am Main, she took up an office job with a real estate company there. She probably joined the still small office workers' union in 1906 and the SPD in 1910. In the same year, she went to Paris to work for a Frankfurt metal trading company. From then on, she was committed to the French Socialist Party, not least in terms of uniting people, and years later she was made an honorary member of the party.

The outbreak of war forced her to return to Germany in 1914, where she immediately became active in the anti-war movement. In March 1915, she took part in the international socialist women's conference against the war in Bern. When Robert Dißmann, the Frankfurt SPD district secretary for Hesse-Nassau, was called up for military service, she led the war opposition in south-west Germany on his behalf. Together with her friend and temporary partner, she was one of the founders of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917. From the November Revolution the following year, Sender served as General Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Frankfurt Workers' Council.

In 1919, she took over the editorial management of the USPD newspaper "Volksrecht". The following year, she was also appointed editor of the "Betriebsräte-Zeitschrift" of the German Metalworkers' Association, a position she held until 1933. From March 1919 to 1924, she was a city councillor in Frankfurt. In 1920, Toni Sender was elected to the Reichstag as the USPD's top candidate in constituency 21 Hesse-Nassau. Since the unification of the non-communist remnant USPD with the majority Social Democrats in the fall of 1922, she held her seats for the SPD. From 1924 until the spring of 1933, she represented Reichstag constituency 28 Dresden-Bautzen. During these years, she also frequently appeared as an inspiring event speaker in her home region of southern Hesse, as well as in Belgium, France and the USA. In 1927, she was elected to the advisory board of the German League for Human Rights. And in 1928, the active left-winger was also entrusted with the editorship of the SPD magazine "Frauenwelt".

Toni Sender was undoubtedly one of the most courageous defenders of the Weimar Republic, which is why she was subjected to a massive smear campaign by the NSDAP and the German Nationals. She propagated the political general strike as a defense against the impending Nazi takeover, while sharply rejecting the KPD's appeals for a united front. When the Nazi attacks against her culminated in open death threats after the Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933, her only option was to flee.

From exile, she continued her fight against the Nazis undeterred, initially from Czechoslovakia, then from Antwerp from the summer of 1933. At the end of 1936, the pacifist, who had been expatriated by the German Reich in 1934, was one of the signatories of the Paris Popular Front appeal "For peace, freedom and bread!" alongside many other prominent German opponents of the regime. In the USA, where she emigrated at the end of 1935, she initially had to make ends meet as a foreign correspondent for a Paris and a Brussels newspaper. At the same time, she was constantly informing people about the reign of terror in her home country. In mid-1937, an extended trip to Europe gave her the opportunity to find out about the civil war in Spain and the Popular Front government in France, among other things.

Soon after her return to the USA, still in 1937, Sender joined the American Labor Party. Following the November pogrom of 1938, she immediately began to campaign for the granting of guarantees to enable German Jews to immigrate to the USA. Her "Autobiography of a German Rebel", published in 1939, also had a clear anti-Nazi thrust. In the summer of that year, she traveled to Europe again to promote her book. At the same time, she wanted to collect material for an educational pamphlet about the German opposition to Hitler, but she refrained from doing so again so as not to jeopardize the conspiratorial logistics of the resistance cadres.

In 1940, for the first time, she organized introductory trade union courses for newly arrived refugees from her home country and Austria in the United States. She also gathered her own discussion group of émigré friends: the Toni Sender Group. She joined the German American Congress for Democracy, an anti-Nazi and anti-Stalinist group of which she became Vice President. From 1941, she produced numerous studies for the Office of Strategic Services, which became important for reconstruction in most European countries. She also signed the appeal "For the Free Germany of Tomorrow" from October of that year, a manifesto of the strongly anti-communist Association of Free Germans, of which she was a board member.

At the beginning of 1944, Sender took up her position as an economic expert in the Central Europe Division of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She paid particular attention to the fate of the forced laborers pressed into Germany by the Nazis and the survivors of the concentration camps and Nazi murder factories, the displaced persons. From 1947, she worked as an assistant to the representatives of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at the UN Economic and Social Council, and from 1950 to 1956 in the same capacity for the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Fierce political controversies with the communist World Federation of Trade Unions were inevitable. The adoption of a convention against slavery in 1956 and a similar convention on the abolition of forced labor the following year, which did not come into force until 1959, was due in part to Toni Sender's tireless efforts.

Her hope of being able to return to Germany soon after the war remained unfulfilled. Instead, she worked in many ways to improve the miserable living conditions of her former compatriots. Furthermore, since the West German trade unions joined the ICFTU, she also represented their interests at the UN.

Only a few people in post-war Germany remembered Toni Sender, including her old friend, former Reichstag President Paul Löbe, and a number of other leading SPD politicians such as Erich Ollenhauer, Herbert Wehner and Willy Brandt, as well as Martin Hörner, SPD Chairman in Wiesbaden-Biebrich. The most important politician once based in Hesse died after years of suffering from Parkinson's disease in the USA, of which she had become a citizen in 1943. She was buried at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge, New Jersey. In Wiesbaden's Biebrich district, a retirement and nursing home and a day care center are named after her, and she is also commemorated by the Toni Sender Academy - Socialist Education Community, the party school of the SPD district of Hesse-South, located in the Hessian state capital. To mark the 50th anniversary of her death, a memorial plaque was also placed on the house where she was born at Stettiner Straße 6 in Wiesbaden-Biebrich.