Heinz Brandt (resistance fighter)

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Heinz Brandt (born August 16, 1909 in Posen ; † January 8, 1986 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a communist resistance fighter against National Socialism , initially a SED functionary in the GDR and later a political prisoner . In 1979 he was a founding member of the Greens .

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Neumannstrasse 50, in Berlin-Pankow

The son of a Jewish family in Poznan studied economics in Berlin . In 1931 he joined the KPD , where he belonged to the inner-party opposition movement of the so-called Compromisers . 1933 after the seizure of power by the NSDAP he gave the illegal Communist newspaper operation Siemens speaker with out. In 1934 he became to six years in prison sentenced, after they have served, he was in the 1940 Sachsenhausen transferred. From there he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 . In the Auschwitz concentration camp, Brandt took part in the documentation of the extermination process ; the documents could later be smuggled out of the camp and thus ended up in the hands of the Allies. After the "evacuation" of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, Brandt was brought to the Buchenwald concentration camp and was liberated there .

Brandt came to Berlin and got a job with the city administration as an employee of the Main Committee on Victims of Fascism , which was headed by Karl Raddatz . At the end of 1945 he became head of the press department at the KPD in Berlin and after the forced merger of the SPD with the KPD for the SED. In 1949/50 he attended the party college "Karl Marx " and then became secretary of the SED district leadership in Berlin, responsible for propaganda (training) and later for agitation.

During the strike on June 16, 1953, Brandt achieved a lowering of the high labor standards that were not reduced in the course of the SED's “new course”. During the uprising of June 17, 1953 , Brandt tried to channel the demonstrations because he felt them to be a tragedy: The SED's new course that had previously been initiated was endangered, and Walter Ulbricht's position of power was again strengthened. In the course of the Zaisser - Herrnstadt affair, he was released from his position as secretary in August 1953 and reinstated as head of department for the SED's West Berlin work. On August 4, 1954, he received a severe reprimand for "immoral behavior" and was banned from working for one year. He was transferred to a publishing house.

In 1956 Brandt contacted the SPD's east office through old friends in the west . Up until his escape in 1958, he reported on oppositional currents in the GDR, which he wanted to strengthen through cooperation with the East Office of the SPD . After the XX. At the CPSU party congress , Brandt was able to travel to Moscow to find out about the fate of his siblings. He learned that his brother had fallen victim to the Stalinist purges and that his sister had been exiled to Siberia . In September 1958 Brandt fled to the Federal Republic because he feared arrest. He found a job as an editor at IG Metall -Organ Metall .

Brandt, who was working in West Berlin, was lured into a trap on June 16, 1961 by the Ministry for State Security . While visiting a family he knew, he was bid farewell with an anesthetic whiskey. When he slumped on the street ten to fifteen minutes later, he was kidnapped by four alleged helpers with the words "We have been waiting for you" in the GDR. It took several days for him to recover from the effects of the anesthetic. He later stated in an interview:

“I was then expected by the state security guards in East Berlin, and they urged me to declare that I had come voluntarily, disgusted by the war preparations in the Federal Republic. Apparently they wanted to abuse me as a key witness for the necessities of building the wall. "

- Heinz Brandt

After around one year of solitary confinement and interrogation in the remand prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , he was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1962 for “serious espionage in the act of unity with state-endangering propaganda and agitation in a serious case”. This was followed by two years imprisonment in the Bautzen II special prison . A worldwide campaign by IG Metall, left-wing socialists, Amnesty International and Bertrand Russell led to his release in 1964. After returning to the Federal Republic of Germany, Brandt fought for a humane socialism. He was in close contact with his great cousin Erich Fromm . Both emphasized the need for a moral left that opposes oppression and disenfranchisement everywhere.

At the Federal Congress in 1968 Brandt was elected to the board of the Association of Conscientious Objectors .

As an IG Metall editor, Brandt had a certain amount of discourse power in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, he behaved largely loyalty to the organization, and it was only after his retirement in 1974 that Brandt acted very openly in the socialist left. In 1977, Brandt criticized the pro-nuclear stance of many trade unionists and, together with other DGB members, founded the union anti-nuclear initiative Action Group , which resulted in an exclusion procedure from the IGM board, which, however, quickly - also due to a broad internal union solidarity campaign - was discontinued.

Together with his friend Rudi Dutschke , Brandt took part in the long founding process of the Greens . He hoped to prevent an ecological catastrophe in a broad gathering party. After these ideas failed, however, Brandt resigned from the Greens. He saw himself as an independent Marxist who criticized the left, especially with regard to an overly positive assessment of the Soviet Union .

Brandt's political position in the last years of his life is expressed in a letter that he addressed to the Humanist Union , Landesverband Berlin, on July 5, 1984 : “Whoever does not unconditionally support human rights and human dignity , our constitutional rights and civil liberties, for freedom and democracy occurs at all, is also not a credible anti-Nazi, and certainly not a particularly radical one (no matter how vehemently he calls himself an 'anti-fascist', which suggests bad things). "

Fonts

  • A dream that cannot be hijacked. My way between east and west. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-921572-25-8 .

Honors

In December 1984 the University of Osnabrück awarded him an honorary doctorate.

The Heinz Brandt School in Berlin-Weißensee is named after him . A street that was set up in 2005/2006 on the former wall strip on the edge of the Pankow industrial area PankowPark received his name.

On August 16, 2019 , a Berlin memorial plaque was unveiled at his former place of residence, Berlin-Pankow , Neumannstrasse 50 .

literature

  • Bruno Baum : Resistance in Auschwitz. VVN , Berlin 1949.
  • Knud Andresen : “Traitors to State and Party?” Heinz Brandt and the East Office of the SPD 1956 to 1958. In: International Scientific Correspondence on the History of the German Labor Movement. 39, Berlin 2004 ISSN  0046-8428 , pp. 505-524.
  • Knud Andresen: Heinz Brandt. A contentious intellectual and IG Metall. In: Bulletin of the Institute for Social Movements. Issue 35, Bochum 2006 ISSN  0173-2471 , pp. 121-136.
  • Knud Andresen: Contradiction as a life principle. The undogmatic socialist Heinz Brandt (1909–1986). Dietz, Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-4170-4 .
  • Anja Mihr: The international efforts of Amnesty International in the Heinz Brandt case. In: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement. 37, Berlin 2001, ISSN  0046-8428 , SS 449-464.

Web links

Commons : Heinz Brandt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Heinz Brandt describes the events surrounding his kidnapping. Kidnapping - a forgotten chapter in German post-war history. Sound document. In: SWR.de. October 18, 2016, accessed March 12, 2018 .
  2. ^ The Federal Congress 1968 , Civil, Volume 13, No. 6, June 1968, p. 63
  3. ↑ Only in this edition, p. 23. - Name in the ext. Editions 1957, 1962 removed
personal data
SURNAME Brandt, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Communist resistance fighter against National Socialism and SED functionary
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1986
Place of death Frankfurt am Main