Karl Retzlaw

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Karl Retzlaw (born February 10, 1896 in Schneidemühl , † June 20, 1979 in Frankfurt am Main , official until 1953: Karl Gröhl ) was a German socialist politician and publicist.

Life

Retzlaw, who came from an impoverished Baptist working-class family, moved to Berlin in 1908 , where, after graduating from elementary school, he worked in a bronze foundry and joined a socialist youth workers' group. His father died early and he had to help support the family through messenger activities. In 1915, at the age of 19, he came into contact with the " Spartacus Group " through leaflets , for which he was henceforth conspiratorial.

He joined the USPD in 1917 as an opponent of the SPD's truce policy , which he had joined during the First World War . At the time he was working as a tool grinder in the Cassirer cable works in Berlin and was elected as a shop steward by the unionized workers.

In 1918, at the age of 21, he refused military service on the occasion of an order to be drafted and in the same year was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for "non-compliance with the presentation order" and taken to the military prison fortress Osowiec in Poland . At the beginning of November 1918, a few days before the end of the First World War, Karl Retzlaw was released and returned to Berlin.

The German Revolution 1918-19

He took an active part in the November Revolution as a member of the Spartakusbund on the side of Karl Liebknecht . At the beginning of 1919, Retzlaw joined the newly founded KPD and fought together with Leo Jogiches in the Spartacus uprising against the Berlin free corps and police dictatorship of Gustav Noske , through which the SPD government tried to suppress a revolution based on the Russian model by force. After Jogiches was murdered in the suppression of the March fighting in Berlin, Retzlaw fled Berlin to Munich .

When he arrived in Munich, he sought contact with Max Levien , the chairman of the Communist Party of Bavaria. Here Retzlaw supported the formation of the Munich Soviet Republic , against the Hoffmann government, which came to power after the assassination of the first Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner (USPD) . After the general strike was organized on April 7, 1919, he became police commissioner and Munich police chief . After the experience with police violence in Berlin and against the background of the counter-movements that were forming, Retzlaw ordered the destruction of all police files as a security measure.

In illegality

After the defeat of the Soviet Republic lived Retzlaw extended period of time under a false identity and worked as a full-time functionary of the Communist Party, as deputy district head in Brandenburg , as managing director of the Comintern -Verlages Verlagsbuchhandlung Carl Hoym Hamburg and as head of the illegal apparatus of the party, where he met the “ Comrade Thomas ” shrouded in mystery , who lived illegally in Berlin as an agent of the Soviet Union and organized the establishment of the Western Europe section of the Comintern. During this time he expanded the KPD's intelligence service under the identity of "Karl Friedberg". The liberation of communists from prison and sabotage formed the focus of his work at the time. Retzlaw tried unsuccessfully to free Max Hoelz, who had been in prison since 1921 . Between 1919 and 1926, Retzlaw made several trips to the Soviet Union together with other communists - Walter Ulbricht , Hermann Duncker or August Thalheimer . Several visits at the invitation of the new member of the new Internal Directory of the Soviet Government, Josef Stalin, could only be undertaken at high personal risk, since until 1920 these fell during the Russian Civil War .

Arrested in February 1926, Retzlaw was sentenced to two years and six months imprisonment by the Leipzig Reich Court in June 1927 for his political activities and was given an amnesty in July 1928.

In the meantime, against the background of the politics of the leadership of the KPD and Comintern as well as the experiences during the visits to the Soviet Union, Retzlaw had developed into a critic of the line of Stalin and Ernst Thalmann and sympathized with the positions of Leon Trotsky . Nevertheless, after his release from prison, he found a job as managing director of the Neue Deutsche Verlag , headed by Willi Münzenberg .

exile

After the " takeover " of the NSDAP and the fire in the Reichstag , Retzlaw first went into hiding and then traveled to Moscow in February 1933 to report to the Comintern leadership on current developments in Germany. Here he explicitly warned against a misjudgment of the peaceful coexistence of Hitler-Germany with the Soviet Union; an opinion that he would later repeat in a personal letter to Stalin.

To avoid being arrested by the Nazis, he moved to Switzerland after his stay in the Soviet Union . There he met the later editor of the Frankfurter Rundschau , Karl Gerold . In November 1933 he then declared his resignation from the KPD and joined the Trotskyist International Communists of Germany (IKD).

In 1934 he moved to Saarland , where he took part in the fight against the annexation of the area to Germany. He worked there as the cultural secretary of the Saarland Social Democrats. During this time he visited Trotsky for four days in Saint Palais sur Mer . After the vote was lost, he fled to France in January 1935 . There he took part in activities against German arms delivery to Franco during the Spanish Civil War . Briefly interned after the start of the war from 1939 to 1940, he fled from the advancing Wehrmacht via southern France to Lisbon in the summer of 1940 . Finally, in a newspaper kiosk in Marseille , he learned of Trotsky's assassination.

When he arrived in Lisbon, the British secret service flew him on to Great Britain on October 9, 1940 . In British exile he founded the Bund Deutscher Revolutionär Sozialisten (BDRS) in the German Democratic Socialist Federation and was active in the Fight for Freedom group . In London he stayed in touch with Karl Gerold, who had remained in Switzerland, through the channels of the British Intelligence Service. In 1946 Retzlaw returned to Saarland and joined the SPD, but maintained friendly relations with his comrades from the IKD.

After the Second World War

Retzlaw lived in the Federal Republic since 1950. Until 1963 he worked as a publisher for the Frankfurter Rundschau , headed by Karl Gerold, and was chairman of the works council there for many years. He was also active in the Bund of Victims of the Nazi Regime and the Association for Freedom and Human Dignity and founded the left-wing discussion forum “ Arbeitskreis Karl Liebknecht ” in 1973 together with Augustin Souchy , Peter Bernhardi and Peter Maslowski .

Works (selection)

  • Spartakus: German Communists. Foreword by Alfred M. Wall. Transl. by E. Fitzgerald. Hutchinson & Co., London, New York a. Melbourne 1944.
  • Spartacus - rise and fall. Memories of a party worker . New Criticism Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971 (and several subsequent editions) ISBN 3-8015-0096-9 internationalesozialisten.de ( Memento from January 18, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) PDF.

literature

  • Jörg Später: The criticism of the “other Germany”. Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Karl Retzlaw and Hans Jaeger in exile in London. In: Gunther Nickel (ed.): Literary and political concepts of Germany 1938–1949. Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-721-7 , pp. 163-185.
  • Jörg Später: The criticism of the “other Germany”. In: “Jour fixe” initiative Berlin (ed.): Fluchtlinien des Exile. Unrast, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-89771-431-0 .
  • Retzlaw, Karl . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  • Karin Puck, Peter Bernhardi: … keep the flame burning! - Articles by and about Karl Retzlaw. Selected and compiled. Edited by the Karl Liebknecht working group, June 1981.
  • Peter Bernhardi (Ed.): “Socialism is humane, is democratic or it is not at all” On the 100th birthday of the socialist Karl Retzlaw. Frankfurt am Main 1996.
  • Wolfgang Abendroth : Adventure of a Spartacist: Revolutions from the perspective of a party worker . In: The time . January 28, 1972 ( zeit.de ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alexander Watlin: The Comintern 1919-1929. Decaton-Verlag, Mainz 1993.
  2. ^ Karl Retzlaw: Spartakus - Rise and Fall, Memory of a Party Worker. New Critique Verlag, Frankfurt 1971, p. 375, ISBN 3-8015-0096-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Retzlaw, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gröhl, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German socialist politician and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Schneidemühl
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 1979
Place of death Frankfurt am Main