Huppertz, Willy 1904-1978

Reinhold Wilhelm Huppertz was born on 18th November 1904 in Dusseldorf. He worked as a fitter. He moved from being a Christian socialist to a position of atheism. In the mid-1920s he contacted both the FAUD and the AAUE, and worked with them. A militant anarchist communist and anarcho-syndicalist, Willy Huppertz became close to the paper Proletarischer Zeitgeist published in Zwickau.He was arrested with the Nazi rise to power and suffered a long interrogation, finally being released after several weeks. He was again arrested in September 1940( ?) and transferred to Oranienburg concentration camp on 20th July 1944 as a repercussion of the bomb plot against Hitler. He managed to survive despite a reduction in his rations.

At the end of the war, he turned down the offer of a permanent position in the union structure because of his anarchist principles and began to re-establish contacts with the few surviving comrades in the Ruhr and with anarchists in the Russian occupation zone and in particular with Willi Jelinek, who sent him money to buy a duplicator as well as sending the old subscription list to Zeitgeist. He began editing the anarchist magazine Befreiung (Liberation) published in Essen from March 1948 up to 1973 when he handed it over to a group of young militants in Cologne. This continued publishing until 1978 with a print run of 1,500. Willy was, in general, suspicious and sceptical about the new radical movements, feeling that they were too influenced by Leninism and notions of national liberation. In 1950/51, together with Rudolf Oestreich, the old leading light of the FKAD, he published Der Freie Arbeiter and then the Vereinigte Blaetter, an unsuccessful and short lived merger of Befreiung and Der Freie Arbeiter.. At the end of the 1960s, he participated with Rudolf Krell in the preparatory work for the International Congress of Anarchist Federations (CIFA) and contributed to the Bulletin of the Preparatory Commission published in Paris, (11 issues from September 1966 to August 1968) edited by Guy Malouvier. Willy died at Mulheim on 15th March 1978.
NICK HEATH