Werner Hansen (31 July 1905 – 15 June 1971) was a German Social democratic politician and trades unionist. After 1933 he stayed in Germany for several years undertaking illegal resistance work, and emigrating only in 1937. He was able to return and resume his trades union career in 1945. Life Werner was born, one of three sons, at Rethem, a small but long established town located between Bremen and Hanover. His father, Heinrich Heidorn, worked for the post office. It is not known when, why or how Werner changed his own family name to Hansen. His secondary education took him to a "commercial school" in Hanover. Between 1923 and 1927 he was employed as a clerk in a gold and silver trading business. Hansen joined both the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and, in 1926, the Zentralverband der Angestellten (ZdA), a white collar trades union. In 1927 he relocated to Bremen, becoming a member of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK / "International Socialist Militant League")), later contributing to "Der Funke", which was the daily newspaper published by the ISK for slightly more than twelve months, starting in January 1932. Régime change came to Germany at the start of 1933 and the new government lost little time in creating its one-party dictatorship. Membership of political parties (apart from the Nazi party) became illegal. In Bremen it proved impossible to undertake political work, and Hansen moved to Cologne where he was able to undertake clandestine work for the ISK while supporting himself with casual jobs as a kitchen assistant in a succession of hotels. Between 1933 and 1937, together with Hans Dohrenbusch, he took a leading role in illegal political work in the Rhineland, while managing to maintain trades union contacts internationally, notably with the International Transport Workers' Federation. He was briefly detained by the Gestapo in 1937. A wave of arrests which accompanied the effective smashing of his clandestine network in the Rhineland persuaded him to flee to France later in the same year. In 1938 or 1939 he moved on to England where in north-west London there was already a substantial community of ISK political exiles from Germany which he joined. War broke out in September 1939, with large-scale aerial bombing of British cities starting in June 1940. On the home front the British government reacted by identifying several thousand refugees who had fled Germany to escape race based and political