August Winnig

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August Winnig (31 March 1878 – 3 November 1956) was a German politician, essayist and trade unionist. Early involved in trade unionism and editorship, Winnig held elected and public offices from 1913 to 1921 as a Social Democratic Party (SPD) member. As Generalbevollmächtigter ("Minister Plenipotentiary") for the Baltic Provinces in 1918, he signed the official recognition of the Latvian Provisional Government by the German Empire (1871–1918) that ended German claim over the region, despite being an opponent of that renouncement. He was nominated Oberpräsident of East Prussia in 1919, and pressured the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) to create an autonomous eastern State in the Baltics. After his participation in the Kapp putsch of 1920 against the Weimar Republic, Winnig was removed from his positions by the regime and expelled from the SPD. He then became more involved into far-right thinking and, along with Ernst Niekisch, joined the Old Social Democratic Party of Germany (ASP) to turn their theories into a political programme. The ASP failure of the 1928 German federal election led Winnig to abandon his revolutionary programme. Initially welcoming the Nazis in 1933 as providing the "salvation of the State" from Marxism, his Lutheran convictions led Winnig to oppose the Third Reich (1933–1945) for its neo-pagan tendencies. In 1937, he wrote a best-selling essay named Europa. Gedanken eines Deutschen ("Europe. Thoughts of a German") that gives a cultural rather than racial theory of Europe, diverging from the official Nazi doctrines on race, although his book is tainted by antisemitism. Winnig writes in his autobiographies that he went from being a Nazi to a Christian conservative during the Nazi rule over Germany. He died in Bad Nauheim on 3 November 1956. (Source: DBPedia)