[1][2][3][4] Hans Meyer was born in Freudenegg, a village located in western Bavaria, a short distance to the southeast of Ulm.

His experiences from that time also included the support his mother received from a local Jewish business which gave her a job after her husband's arrest, enabling the family to survive.

He escaped, and in 1946 joined IG Metall and the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).

[7] During the next year he found himself campaigning strongly and, it was felt at the time, effectively against proposals by the centre-right Kohl government to place additional restrictions workers' right to strike.

[4] His campaign against the government proposal to change Paragraph 116 of the so-called "Employment Support Law" involved a further mass-mobilisation of more than one million workers.