During and directly after the revolution, for two months during the first half of 1919 and then for more than a year during 1920/21, he served as head of the regional government / Minister-president in the Free State of Braunschweig (Brunswick).
[1][2] Josef "Sepp" Oerter was born in Straubing, the small town at the heart of the fertile Gäuboden region of Lower Bavaria, to the north-east of Munich.
Coming under increasing police pressure, and taking his cue from a number of other anarchist comrades in a similar predicament, early in 1892 he fled to the United States of America.
During 1892 he was also the editor of the New York version of Der Anarchist, published by the "Radical Workers' Association" ("Radikaler Arbeiter Bund") and the "Autonomy" group which also numbered among its members Josef Peukert.
The authorities suspected that Oerter had somehow been involved in Alexander Berkman's attempt to assassinate a wealthy businessman called Henry Clay Frick.
He travelled via London where he arrived in October, and where the editorial group publishing "Autonomy" gave him a mission to take printed material across Belgium to the German frontier in order to effect a clandestine introduction of the anarchist propaganda to Germany.
[1] Returning to Duisburg it might have been prudent to avoid drawing the attention of the authorities to the fact that he was back in town, but this was not Sepp Oerter's habit.
In December 1892 he attended a public meeting in the city, to which he had been able to bring his anarchist propaganda material: he told the comrades present about his experiences in America and in England.
Sepp managed to escape, but he was not sufficiently familiar with the back streets of Duisburg to avoid detection, and he was arrested soon afterwards on one of the bridges over the Rhine.
Released at the end of the eight-year term of detention Oerter went to Berlin where, with his brother, he was a member of what would become the Free Workers' Union of Germany ("Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands" / FAUD).
[7] While his brother Fritz remained faithful to political anarchism, Sepp Oerter abruptly quit the FAUD and abandoned his anarchist ideals.
The next year, in July 1914, war broke out and he became a member of the advisory board ("Beiratsmitglied") to the "Youth Training Associations" ("Jugendbildungsvereine") for the Greater Berlin region.
By 1916 the politically important state of Braunschweig was a focus of activity for the Spartacus League, an increasingly powerful anti-war movement operating, initially, inside the SPD.
Sepp Oerter was a leading figure among the many left-wing SPD members who in 1917 switched to the new Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD).
[9] During the ensuing months of power shifts between Soviet-council republicanism and parliamentary governance Oerter played a leading political role locally, having emerged as a leader of the Braunschweig Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet.
The Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet retained a constitutional right of veto "only in the event of conflict", whereupon a referendum would be held to arbitrate the question at issue.
[11] Sepp Orter's "Worker's Council administration" would later be characterised by Heinrich Jasper, a political rival, as the "dictatorship by an undemocratic minority" ("Diktatur einer undemokratischen Minderheit").
Oerter believed that the underlying principles of the USPD and of the Comintern were incompatible, and advocated closer cooperation with the SPD "Second International", for tactical reasons.