Kurt Müller (politician, 1903)

Kurt Müller (born December 13, 1903 in Berlin-Wedding ; † August 21, 1990 in Konstanz - Dingelsdorf ), (nickname Kutschi) was a German politician ( KPD ) and affected by the Noel Field affair.

Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime

At the age of fifteen, Kurt Müller became a member of the Free Socialist Youth in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt branch in the Berlin-Mitte district in February 1919 . Soon afterwards he became their local group leader and joined the KPD in 1920 . In October 1923 he took over the sub-district management of the KJVD . In early 1926 he became head of the trade union department of the KJVD district of Berlin. In early 1927 he was co-opted into the Central Committee of the KJVD and sent to the Reich Party School of the KPD in Hohnstein (Saxon Switzerland) for three months . He then worked full-time for the KJVD and was sent to England for 2 weeks to support a miners' strike in the same year. At the end of 1927 he was appointed to the trade union department of the Communist Youth International (KJI) in Moscow. He took part in the 5th World Congress of Profintern (Red Union International ) and the 6th World Congress of the KJI. In November 1928 he returned to Berlin and resumed his work in the Central Committee of the KJVD. At the 11th association congress in the summer of 1929 he was elected political director of the KJVD. As a result, he had close contacts with the two secretaries responsible for youth work in the KPD Central Committee, Heinz Neumann and Hermann Remmele , also with Willi Munzenberg and Leo Flieg , who were critical of the course taken by party chairman Ernst Thälmann . From the summer of 1931 he headed the German delegation to the KJI in Moscow. As early as April 1931, he was elected candidate for the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (EKKI) and Secretary of the Communist Youth International (KJI) in Moscow. Because of his contacts with Remmele and Neumann, he was dismissed from these functions and a transfer to Gorki in 1933 was followed by his posting to Germany in March 1934 to rebuild the KPD structures after Thälmann was arrested by the National Socialists. After half a year he was arrested on the basis of a denunciation and sentenced to six years in prison after the most severe abuse in pre-trial detention. After serving it, he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and liberated there in 1945 by Soviet troops.

post war period

Müller was one of the twelve top KPD functionaries who were delegated to the SED executive committee at the 15th party congress in April 1946 . However, by order of the western occupying powers, they had to resign from these offices, as the SED , which was created by the forced unification of the Eastern SPD and KPD , was not permitted in the western zones.

In 1948 Müller was elected deputy party chairman together with Walter Fisch . With the increase in staff in 1948, he moved to the Economic Council of the Bizone for North Rhine-Westphalia , after having been a member of the Zone Advisory Council of the British Zone from 1946 to 1948 . In 1946 he was a member of the appointed Hanover State Parliament and in 1947/48 a member of the first Lower Saxony State Parliament . In the federal election in 1949 he was elected to the German Bundestag .

In 1950 Richard Stahlmann lured Müller to East Berlin . After a conversation with Walter Ulbricht, he was arrested in the Central Committee building and taken to the central remand prison of the State Security in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , where the Deputy Minister for State Security Erich Mielke interrogated him intensively. Despite extensive preparatory work by the GDR, the Soviet Union did not allow the show trial of Müller, as well as against the politicians László Rajk in Hungary, Trajtscho Kostow and others , that was already being prepared as part of the Stalinist purges, to be carried out . a. Instead, Müller was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Soviet military tribunal on February 28, 1953 for “terror, espionage, sabotage, group formation and terrorist activity”. He had been in custody for almost three years. Müller came to a Gulag camp in the Soviet Union. In addition to Müller u. a. Also the former parliamentary group leader in the Hessian state parliament Leo Bauer , the Hamburg state chairman Willi Prinz and Müller's successor as deputy party chairman Fritz Sperling imprisoned due to the Stalinist purges in East Berlin.

His resignation from his mandate was declared by the Bundestag and was not accepted. In May 1950, that is, after the kidnapping, the party executive of the KPD, together with Hugo Ehrlich, expelled him from the party. Müller was accused of having "ongoing contact with the secret service of a foreign power" and of having informed them about "internal party matters". He had "built hostile elements into the party for a long time". The background was the so-called Noel Field Affair . After being expelled from the party on May 10, 1950, Parliament led him as non-attached .

In 1955 Müller was released from Soviet custody under the Adenauer Agreement on the release of prisoners of war and returned to the Federal Republic .

In 1957 Müller joined the SPD . In the following years he worked at various scientific institutes, including from 1960 to 1985 at the research institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , where he headed the department for foreign policy and GDR research .

Rehabilitation

On March 31, 1990, Müller was "politically rehabilitated" by the Central Arbitration Commission of the PDS . It was found that he was a victim of Stalinist repression and unlawful party punishments.

Publications

• Imperialism and the colonization of West Germany. In: Wissen und Tat, 1949, issue 4, pages 14ff.
• Is there a danger of Titoism in our party? In: Neue Volks-Zeitung of September 16, 1949.

literature

• Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Müller, Kurt . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Dieter Dowe (Ed.): Kurt Müller (1903–1990) to commemorate. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-926132-69-8 .
• Eberhard Flessing:  Müller, Kurt. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 450 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Jens Ulrich Klocksin : Communists in Parliament. The KPD in the governments and parliaments of the West German occupation zones and the Federal Republic of Germany (1945–1956). Verlag im Hof: Bonn 1993, 2nd edition 1994; ISBN 3-925689-04-4 ; Pp. 447-450
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists . Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. Second, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag , Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Müller in the catalog of the German National Library
• Kurt Müller on gulag.memorial.de

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dietrich Staritz , Communist Party of Germany. In: Richard Stöss (ed.), Political parties handbook, paperback edition, Westdeutscher Verlag , Opladen 1986, p. 1672.
2. ↑ For the preparation of the process, see Annette Weinke: The Justifall Kurt Müller and its significance for the communist wave of party purges in divided Germany. In: ZfG 45 (1997), pp. 293-310
3. ↑ For the condemnation see Andreas Hilger Mike Schmeitzner, Ute Schmidt (ed.): Soviet military tribunals. Volume 2. The conviction of German civilians 1945–1955 , Böhlau, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-412-06801-2 , pp. 281f.
4. ↑ See: Hans Kluth: The KPD in the Federal Republic: Your political activity and organization 1945 - 1956. Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne / Opladen, 1959, p. 128f
5. ↑ From politics and contemporary history. Supplement to the weekly newspaper Parliament. B. 11/90. March 9, 1990. pp. 16/17. Quoted in: Kurt Müller. Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (stiftung-hsh.de), accessed on June 18, 2013
6. ↑ cf. on the practice of political rehabilitation by the SED / PDS (general) Lothar Hornbogen: Political rehabilitation - a lesson from our history. Die Linke , November 24, 2008