[2] Arno Walter Weidauer was born at the tail end of the nineteenth century in Lauter, a small town in the Kingdom of Saxony some 20 km (12 miles) from the German frontier with Bohemia which at that time was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
[2] In 1929 Weidauer was elected leader of the Carpentry Trades Union in the Essen district, but he resigned three days later on account of "party factionalism" which was a feature of left-wing politics in Germany during the 1920s.
[3] In the next election which took place in November of that same year, the share of the votes going to the Communist Party increased a little, to 16.9%, and Weidauer remained a de facto Reichstag member till March 1933.
Storm troopers began attacking trade union and Communist Party (KPD) offices and the homes of left-wingers,[5] extending their violence to Social Democrats later in the month.
In December 1936 he moved on to Denmark where, using the cover name "Karl Förster", he worked with the northern regional German Communist Party (now in exile).
At the start of 1941 he was returned to Germany by the police and after a further period of detention on 3 June 1942 he was put on trial (briefly) in the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof), a special court set up by the government outside the constitutional frame of law and used for trials involving a widely drawn range of "political offenses".
In February 1945, after the Destruction of Dresden, Weidauer was part of a Prisoners' Detachment moved to the city to help make a start on clearing the residual rubble.
[1] The end of World War II, in May 1945, heralded a return to multi-party politics and on his release Walter Weidauer rejoined the KPD.
In this position Weidauer enjoyed the support of the leading Communist party functionaries in Saxony, Hermann Matern and Kurt Fischer, which already gave him great power over city administration.
[1] The German Democratic Republic would be founded formally only in October 1949, but already the basis for a return to one-party government had created in April 1946, under Soviet administration, with the contentious merger between the old Communist Party and the Moderate-left SPD.
The "bourgeois" parties appreciated a bipartisan approach, which nevertheless ran counter to the increasingly apparent agenda of the new Soviet sponsored SED.
He would be re-elected Lord Mayor and confirmed in office by the Party Central Committee in 1950, 1953 and 1957, resigning eventually in 1958 (possibly on health grounds).
[1] He conducted a vigorous and long-running public argument with the Dresden art historian and conservationist Fritz Löffler [de] on the issues involved.
[9] Despite his own well known reservations about the nature and extent of Dresden's cultural and artistic heritage, Weidauer was the president of the government delegation that arranged for the recovery from the Soviet Union of Dresden's Old Masters' Gallery's artistic treasures (which had been placed in safe storage during World War II, but then confiscated by the Red Army in 1945).
However, following the foundation of the state in 1949, the abolition of the regional tier of government in 1952, and the taming of the "bourgeois parties", community politics became ever less important.
After his retirement from full-time politics Walter Weidauer turned to historical research, focusing in particular on the destruction of the city in February 1945.