Alfred Kowalke

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Memorial plaque for Alfred Kowalke in Boxhagener Strasse, Berlin.

Alfred Kowalke (born April 11, 1907 in Rummelsburg near Berlin ; † March 6, 1944 in Brandenburg-Görden ) was a German KPD functionary and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Kowalke grew up in a working class family and trained as a carpenter . He worked in Berlin and Hamburg . He joined the KJVD in 1921 and joined the KPD in 1925 . As a member of the left wing of the party, he co-signed the letter of the 700 in 1926 in solidarity with the Leningrad opposition. From 1931 he belonged to the illegal AM apparatus of the Central Committee of the KPD. He was responsible for the procurement of weapons and ammunition and at the end of 1932 traveled to Moscow for military training .

In May 1933 or, according to other information, not until May 1935, Kowalke returned to Germany and joined the anti-fascist resistance in Berlin. The National Socialists intended to arrest him, so that he emigrated abroad in November of the same year. He initially worked in the AM apparatus of the KPD's foreign leadership. He stayed in Danzig for a while and returned to Prague after his contacts were arrested . On behalf of his party he worked in the Prague section leadership that organized the communist resistance in central Germany. In 1937 Kowalke moved to the West Section Head in Amsterdam . As an instructor for the Central Committee of the KPD, he illegally crossed the German-Dutch border several times and worked in Bremen , Dortmund and the Aachen area. There he was able to collect information about the reality of life in National Socialist Germany. After the attack on the Soviet Union began in 1941, he first worked illegally in West Germany and then in Berlin. Kowalke belonged to the core of the resistance organization around Wilhelm Knöchel , whom he knew from the time of his exile in Amsterdam. On several occasions, Kowalke made contact with the resistance group around Robert Uhrig and delivered directives to organize the illegal struggle. During his stays in Berlin, he either stayed with the working-class athlete Hans Zoschke or the couple Charlotte and Erich Garske . He also wrote for several illegal papers. On February 2, 1942 - according to other information in 1943 - Kowalke was arrested in Berlin. On November 5, 1943, the “ People's Court ” sentenced him to death. The sentence was carried out on March 6, 1944 in the Brandenburg-Görden prison . His urn was later buried in the memorial of the socialists (urn collecting grave by the large porphyry memorial plaque on the right side of the curtain wall) in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde central cemetery.

Alfred Kowalkes 1906 born widow Gerda died in 1988. Their ashes were on the Friedrichsfelde Berlin Central Cemetery in the graves plant for the victims and persecuted by the Nazi regime buried.

Honors

Memorial stone in the "Alfred Kowalke" allotment garden in Berlin-Stralau

literature

  • Luise Kraushaar : German resistance fighters 1933-1945. Biographies and letters . Volume 1. Dietz, Berlin 1970, pp. 516-519.
  • Peter Altmann: The German anti-fascist resistance 1933-1945 in pictures and documents . Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 208.
  • Peter Steinbach , Johannes Tuchel (ed.): Lexicon of Resistance 1933–1945 . 2nd Edition. CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 119.
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 (online) .

Web links

Commons : Alfred Kowalke  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Maur : Memorials of the labor movement in Berlin-Friedrichshain , ed. by the "District Commission for Research into the History of the Local Labor Movement", 1981.
personal data
SURNAME Kowalke, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German KPD functionary and anti-fascist resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Rummelsburg near Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1944
Place of death Brandenburg