Alfréd Meissner
Alfréd Meissner was a Czech politician and member of the Social Democratic Party in the First Czechoslovak Republic. He was elected to the National Assembly and served twice as Minister of Justice and twice as Minister of Social Welfare of the republic. Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He survived the Holocaust, and after the war he returned to Prague where he died at the age of 79.
Life
Alfréd Meissner was born on 10 April 1871 in Mladá Boleslav in Bohemia, Austria-Hungary. He studied law at the University of Vienna and the University of Prague. After obtaining the degree of Doctor of Law, he worked as a lawyer in Prague. In 1898 he joined the Social Democratic Party, of which he became an influential member. He married Rosa Sommer, and together they had three children.When the First Czechoslovak Republic was formed in 1918, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the National Assembly. Meissner made important contributions to statutes and the constitution of the new republic. He served as Minister of Justice of the Czechoslovak Republic from 25 May 1920, until 15 September 1920; and from 12 July 1929, until 14 February 1934. Subsequently, he was made Minister of Social Welfare in 1934. An office he held until 4 June 1935, when he was replaced by Jaromír Nečas. He then briefly held the same post again, from 5 November to 18 December at the end of 1935. In 1930, Meissner was made honorary president of the conference of the International Association of Penal Law in Prague. He was also the managing director of a factory. By reelection he remained a member of the National Assembly until the German invasion and subsequent occupation in 1939.
Edvard Munch painted several portraits of Rosa Meissner and of Olga and Rosa Meissner which are now in museums including the Munch Museum, the Bergen Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum of Art.
Due to his Jewish origins, Meissner and his family were persecuted by the Nazis. The Germans deported Meissner and his wife to the Theresienstadt concentration camp; they arrived there on 30 January 1942. In Theresienstadt, Meissner was one of the elders of the Jewish Council led by Benjamin Murmelstein. At the end of the war on 1 May 1945, control of the camp was transferred from the Germans to the Red Cross.
The Commandant of the camp and the SS subsequently fled a few days later, and on May 8 Theresienstadt was liberated by Soviet troops. Rosa Meissner was transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz where she was murdered.
Meissner returned to Prague in the summer of 1945, where he lived until his death in 1950, at the age of 79.