Ferdinand Jung (24 January 1905 – 2 December 1973) was a German Communist activist who resisted the Nazi government in the 1930s and spent a good deal of time in prisons and concentration camps.
[1] Jung was born early in 1905 into a working-class family in Waltershausen, a small manufacturing town in south-central Germany which since 1815 had built up a reputation as a centre for doll and toy making.
[1] Germany underwent significant regime change in January 1933 when the NDSDAP (Nazi Party) took power, and lost little time in imposing the country's first twentieth century one-party dictatorship.
A feature of the new government's leadership was a powerful capacity for hatred: Chancellor Hitler had for many years been particularly vitriolic on the subject of Communists.
Between February 1946 and October 1948 he served in Weimar-Erfurt as First Secretary of the People's Solidarity organisation, a non-parliamentary Mass movement after the Leninist model, focused in this instance on funding and administering care for the elderly.
Ferdinand Jung was one of many Communists who lost little time in signing their membership across to the resulting Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
Ferdinand Jung retained his party post in Thuringia until 1952 when the regional tier of government was abolished, powers being transferred up the line to the centre or down to local bodies.
Between 1952 and January 1953 Jung served as First Secretary of the Party Leadership in Meiningen,[4] a midsize town in the administrative district of Suhl.