This reflected Bleicher's wartime activities as a detainee at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was one of those who risked their lives to save a child prisoner called Stefan Jerzy Zweig.

It seems likely that among the politically active he was becoming well known in the Stuttgart area as an energetic party organiser: that was certainly reflected a few years later in evidence provided at his politicised trial, after the Nazi takeover.

In May 1933 he fled across the frontier to Schaffhausen, and by a series of further steps crossed France to the Saarland which, for historical reasons, was still free of Nazi control because it was still under foreign military occupation.

Bleicher's position enabled him to ensure than the most needy detainees were given the clothes of those who had died, and he increasingly earned respect among fellow prisoners whom he organised with skill and compassion, supporting those who collapsed from the intensity of the physical work, thereby often rescuing these from certain death.

Plans to marry Helene Beck, a friend whom he had known for eleven years, had to be abandoned after her final letter to him at the concentration camp, received in 1940, broke off their relationship.

[2] In his 1958 novel Naked Among Wolves the East German writer Bruno Apitz told the story of how a three-year-old boy was rescued by a group of fellow inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

[9] During the final weeks of the war Willi Bleicher was identified as a co-organiser of a celebration undertaken to commemorate Ernst Thälmann, the communist leader whom the authorities had recently murdered at the camp.

However, with the Soviets focusing their military attention on Berlin, it was actually members of the US 97th Infantry Division who liberated Willi Bleicher in the frontier region between Germany and Czechoslovakia.

He managed to escape from a prisoner of war detention camp near Eger and return, first to Buchenwald, where he recovered his identity papers, and then to Stuttgart over several stages, one of which involved "jumping" a train.

One urgent task was to care for the large number of forced labourers, mostly from Poland and the Soviet Union, whom the Nazis had conscripted to work at the Daimler-Benz plant – used, during the war, for aircraft production.

Bleicher was able to gain credibility as an anti-Nazi activist both through his reputation from before the war and with his passport from the Buchenwald concentration camp – helpfully issued by the Nazi authorities as a multi-lingual document.

Nevertheless, even though he put himself forward – unsuccessfully – as a communist candidate for election to the local council, Bleicher saw the principal channel of his future activity not in party politics but in the trades union movement.

Within the union it is reported by numerous contemporary witnesses that whenever conflicts arose involving older colleagues, if there was any doubt over the situation, Bleicher would stand behind "his trusted young people".

In February 1955, together with the regional IG Metall head, Hans Mayr, he succeeded in organising a demonstration at Göppingen where thousands of workers took to the streets to voice their opposition to "a resurgence of militarism".

At one business meeting he talent spotted the young piece worker, Hilde Kirsamer, whom he backed within the union and who in the end was appointed Work council president at the Märklin company.

The dock workers strike in Schleswig-Holstein had lasted for 16 weeks during 1956/57, but had paved the way for equal treatment of dockworkers with salaried employees in respect of wage levels and sickness absences.

[11] Intellectual underpinnings for the wages policy of IG Metall during and beyond the 1950s came from Viktor Agartz, head of the Economic Research Institute at the Trade Union Confederation (DGB).

Along with this, it was intended to build workers' willingness to engage in struggle and to sharpen class awareness, a goal which was entirely in line with Bleicher's own long established philosophy of trades unionism.

Herbert van Hüllen took over at the head of the metal and electrical employers' confederation in 1961, representing a younger generation on the management side, eager to apply a more confrontational interpretation of the industrialists' interests.

[11] If in 1962 the parties had been able, despite the difficulties, to agree a framework to regulate wage negotiations without resort to strikes, 1963 would not have been the year of the longest and most extensive labour disputes in West Germany's postwar history.

Under the pretext of acting in the general interests of the country as a whole, and protecting the nation from supposed economic damage, they wanted to push through implementation of a "Master of this house" standpoint".

The employers' side reacted just two days later with a lockout that affected around 300,000 workers and carried a clear message of their determination to break IG Metall financially as a way to preventing future strikes.

Memories were awakened of the Ruhr iron workers' strike of 1928 when employers had acted with uncompromising severity across Germany, seeking to break not merely the trades unions but also, many believed, to shake the democratic underpinnings of the state.

[11] It was only after it had become apparent that the workers in the southwest and IG Metall were not prepared to accept the extreme demands of the employers' representatives that both parties finally agreed, on 7 May, to mediation by the national Minister of Finance, Ludwig Erhard.

He confided to his close colleague Eugen Loderer – later national president of IG Metall – during the build-up to the vote, "... if this goes wrong, our reputation will be out of the window, after we put our region on the frontline".

At this point Economics Minister Karl Schiller unexpectedly invited the leaders of the employers' confederation, Gesamtmetall and of IG Metall to a mediation meeting, which took place in Bonn on 25 and 26 October 1967.

Immediately the "Association of Württemberger-Baden Metal-based Industrialists" ("Verband WürttembergischBadischer Metallindustrieller" / VMI) took a further step, for which detailed plans had probably been in place since September 1971, and moved to implement a widespread lockout which would have the effect of inflicting intense financial damage on the union.

IG Metall was once again seeking to apply a strategy of "targeted strikes", while Bleicher, according to a report in Der Spiegel, was working for a complete standstill across the affected sectors.

Meanwhile, Josef Stingl, president of the National Labour Agency ("Bundesagentur für Arbeit") refused to allow employers to make "short-time payments" to the affected workers.

Under the leadership of Bleicher and Schleyer the negotiating teams met in Stuttgart's Hotel Graf Zeppelin and took part in a 30-hour marathon session, this time without the involvement of mediators.