International workers' aid

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The International Workers Aid ( IAH ) was an organization affiliated with the KPD that provided social benefits for workers in the 1920s and early 1930s and maintained or started various proletarian film production companies . The IAH was headquartered in Berlin .

founding

The IAH was founded in Berlin on August 12, 1921 in response to a call from Lenin , who sought international support on the occasion of a drought and famine in the Volga region ( famine in Soviet Russia 1921–1922 ), as a foreign committee to organize workers' aid for the hungry Russia initially established provisionally. The first action brought a rebuff: the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU, or Amsterdam International) preferred to hand over funds collected to the Red Cross . The union official Edo Fimmenasked what the communists wanted from the IFTU, since they had sabotaged their international, proletarian aid operations in Austria and Hungary and insulted the IFTU as traitors to the working class. Chairman of the now no longer provisional IAH was Willi Munzenberg . He had previously recommended himself as a committed youth functionary within the left. Until her death in 1933, the honorary president of the organization was the politician and women's rights activist Clara Zetkin . The IAH's representative at the Comintern and manager of the Moscow office was the writer Franz Jung in the first year . In 1926 the IAH Central Committee consisted of the following members: Clara Zetkin, Francesco Misiano (1884–1936), Olga Dawidowna Kamenewa , Willi Münzenberg, Georg Ledebour , Karl Grünberg , Alfons Paquet , John William (Willy) Kruyt (1877–1943) , O. Levassart, Albert Fournier (1882–1971), Koumengau (Beijing), Harry Pickard (Sydney), Ladislaus Veran (Prague), Raissa Adler .

activities

IAH holiday camp for working class children in Stuttgart-Sillenbuch (1926)

The IAH raised $ 5 million on deliveries during the famine, but fell well short of the American Relief Administration's $ 63 million delivery , which was continually belittled by IAH propaganda in the years that followed. What was more of a hindrance were propaganda campaigns in which dozens of railway wagons were made available for deliveries that would have easily fit on a truck - "at a time when thousands of people are starving to death every day due to the lack of transport".

Although the party left had initially ridiculed the IAH as the “Red Salvation Army”, after the attempted insurrection in Hamburg and the subsequent ban on the KPD, the IAH remained undisturbed and was able to maintain the internal communist exchange of information with its groups. In the following years, the IAH supported workers in Germany and other countries in strikes , but also in wars, civil wars and natural disasters by distributing clothing, food and money. She gained her financial resources with the help of appeals for donations, and for a short time the issue of a workers' bond was tested. Further funds were to be obtained from collective farms and industrial plants that the IAH maintained in the Soviet Union . Apparently, however, the large fisheries near Volgograd and Astrakhan , the goods near Kazan and Chelyabinsk , the shoe factory and the outpatient clinic in Moscow as well as the building repair workshop in Petrograd were hardly profitable, but on the contrary relied on financial support from Moscow. Neue Deutsche Verlag developed into the core of the "IAH Group" .

Film productions

Since Munzenberg recognized the potential of cinematic propaganda early on , another area of ​​work for the IAH was the import of Soviet films and the production of its own films. In 1922, Münzenberg founded the Aufbau Industrie und Handels AG in Berlin . The company primarily served to build up Soviet film production, but it was also affiliated with a film office headed by Hermann Basler , which brought a Soviet film to German cinemas for the first time in March 1923 with “Polikuschka” (directed by Alexander Sanin , 1922). After the IAH had already had a stake in the Soviet production company " Russ " / " Meschrabpom-Russ " since 1923 , it took over the company entirely in 1928 and renamed it " Meschrabpom-Film ". When the Reich government began to seal off Germany against the import of foreign films through quota regulations, the IAH itself founded a production company, Prometheus Film , in Vienna in 1924 - Austria offered itself as a bridging country for various reasons, which , however, only produced one film at its Austrian location : Kurt Bernhardt's directorial debut "Nameless Heroes" (1924). The company only developed its real activity after the opening of its Berlin branch, which at the beginning of April took over most of the functions of the closed Viennese headquarters. B. Kuhle Wampe or: Who Owns the World? (1931/32) produced. In 1928, the IAH also founded the film cartel "Weltfilm" GmbH , which specializes in the production of communist documentary films and which also had the purpose of taking on debts with other film companies.

The IAH was supported by numerous left-wing intellectuals, including Albert Einstein , Martin Andersen Nexø , Henri Barbusse , Maxim Gorki , George Grosz , Maximilian Harden , Arthur Holitscher , Käthe Kollwitz , George Bernard Shaw , Upton Sinclair and Ernst Toller .

time of the nationalsocialism

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP in 1933, the IAH in Germany had to cease its activities, the American branch was renamed the "National Committee to Aid the Victims of German Fascism", with headquarters in the Flatiron Building on Broadway in New York. Its truly international character made the IAH a problem for the GPU with increasing fear of spies in Moscow , so the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to dissolve it in 1935 and appointed the Swiss Karl Hofmeyer as liquidator. The IAH branches still operating in France, Czechoslovakia, Austria and other countries were taken over by the International Red Aid ; the film division in Moscow went to the state film monopoly.

See also

literature

  • Willi Munzenberg: Solidarity: Ten Years of International Workers Aid 1921–1931 . Berlin: New German Publishing House 1931.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bread and Machines for Soviet Russia A Year of Proletarian Aid Work By Willi Munzenberger, Verlag der Internationale Arbeiterhilfe Berlin W 8 / Unter den Linden 11 Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (PDF)
  2. ↑ Kasper Braskén: The International Workers' Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity. Willi Munzenberg in Weimar Germany , Verlag Palgrave Macmillan, Houndsmills 2015, p. 36, ISBN 978-1-137-30423-0
  3. ↑ Kasper Braskén: The International Workers' Relief . Houndsmill 2015, p. 37
  4. ↑ a b Franz Jung: The way down. Notes from a great time , (Neuwied 1961), reprint in Uwe Nettelbeck (ed.): Die Republik , Salzhausen 1979, p. 228.
  5. ↑ Die Rote Fahne (Vienna) of May 12, 1926, p. 2
  6. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Munzenberg. A political biography , Stuttgart 1967, p. 139.
  7. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg , Stuttgart 1967, p. 158.
  8. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg , Stuttgart 1967, p. 140.
  9. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg , Stuttgart 1967, p. 134.
  10. ↑ Sean McMeekin: Who on earth is Willi Munzenberg? An interim report from research . In: The International Newsletter of Communist Studies , VI / VII (2000/2001), no 14 ( PDF ( Memento of June 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive )).
  11. ^ Rolf Surmann: The Munzenberg legend. On the journalism of the revolutionary German labor movement 1921–1933 , Prometh Verlag, Cologne 1982, p. 84
  12. ↑ The Russian film. In:  Das Kino-Journal , June 12, 1926, p. 8 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / dkj
  13. ↑ Sean McMeekin: The red millionaire. A political biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's secret propaganda tsar in the West , Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2003, p. 209.
  14. ↑ Sean McMeekin: The red millionaire , New Haven / London 2003, p. 271.
  15. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg , Stuttgart 1967, p. 287 f.
  16. ↑ Sean McMeekin: The red millionaire , New Haven / London 2003, p. 278.