Jaksch, Wenzel

Journalist, politician, member of the Bundestag

Born: 25.09.1896 in Langstrobnitz (Bohemian Forest)

Died: 27.11.1966 in Wiesbaden

Jaksch trained as a bricklayer in Vienna and joined the Social Democrats at the age of 17. He experienced the First World War as a soldier in the Austrian army. He then took over the management of the Central Association of Small Farmers and Cottagers in Komotau

After joining the DSAP (German Social Democratic Workers' Party) in Czechoslovakia, he was appointed to the party executive in 1924 and elected to the Prague parliament in 1929, where he worked until 1938 to promote friendly coexistence between Germans and Czechs. He therefore also opposed Konrad Henlein's Nazi movement. In 1935 he became deputy chairman, and at the last party congress in Prague in 1938 he became chairman of the DSAP.

After the invasion of the Wehrmacht, Jaksch managed to escape to England via Poland at the last minute. As a leading member of two exile organizations, he represented the interests of the Sudeten Germans to the Czechoslovakian government in exile. He desperately campaigned against the so-called Beneš Decrees for the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from the ČSR. In 1946, he experienced the second expulsion in London, when the first large expulsion transports from the Sudetenland began at the beginning of the year. Jaksch moved to Germany to support his expelled compatriots. In 1949, the family first came to Frankfurt am Main, then to Wiesbaden in the 1950s.

In 1950, Minister President Georg August Zinn entrusted him with the Hessian State Office for Expellees. Jaksch developed the plan for the economic, social and societal integration of the displaced persons. On November 10, 1951, the Seliger-Gemeinde was founded as a community of Sudeten German social democrats and Jaksch was elected its chairman. In the 1961 Bundestag election campaign, he was part of the SPD government team and was nominated as Federal Minister for Expellees. Jaksch, a member of the Bundestag, was regarded as a key figure in the politics of expellees and Eastern Europe. He was President of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft and, from 1964, of the Federation of Expellees, as well as Chairman of the "Foundation for European Peace Issues". In the Bundestag, he pointed out the need for a new Ostpolitik as early as 1961.

During the Cold War, he was not only regarded as a visionary of a united and peaceful Europe, but also as an influential author and journalist. His social reportages from the Sudeten German region became famous. The realization of effective ethnic group and minority rights in a united Europe was also close to his heart. He was honored many times, for example in 1966 with the Grand Federal Cross of Merit with Star. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in the USA. Jaksch was buried in the Dotzheim forest cemetery; a street in Kohlheck commemorates him.