Leo Bauer

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Leo Bauer (disambiguation) .

Leopold Bauer (born December 18, 1912 in Skalat , East Galicia , Austria-Hungary , † September 18, 1972 in Bonn ; pseudonym Rudolf Katz) was a German politician ( KPD , SED , SPD ) and adviser to Willy Brandt .

Weimar Republic and the time of National Socialism

Leo Bauer, who came from a Jewish merchant family, joined the SPD in 1928 at the age of 16. In 1931 he switched to the Socialist Workers' Party in Germany and in 1932 to the KPD. After graduating from high school, he began to study economics and law at the Humboldt University in Berlin , but was excluded from the course after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 because of his Jewish origins.

In the same year he was arrested for several months and then emigrated to France . From 1936 to 1939 he worked as an assistant secretary to the High Commissioner of the League of Nations for Refugees. In 1938/39 he was significantly involved in the evacuation of KPD cadres to Great Britain under the pseudonym Rudolf Katz in Prague . In 1939 he was arrested in France and lived in internment camps until the armistice . Since he was on the extradition list, he fled to Switzerland in 1940. In September 1942 he contacted the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of the USA through Noel H. Field . In October 1942 he was arrested because of his illegal residence and on suspicion of espionage as well as because of his work for the Communist Party and sentenced to two years in prison. He spent 19 months in prison at St. Antoine in Geneva and then in an internment camp until 1944. He then worked for the Free Germany Movement and its leader in the Western Switzerland region, liaison to the illegal Labor Party in Switzerland and secretary of the Central Sanitaire Suisse aid organization, which is close to the Communist Party .

State politics in Hesse

In 1945 he returned to Germany. From 1945 to 1949 he became a member of the state leadership of the KPD Hessen . His party named him as a member of the appointed advisory state committee , to which he belonged from February 26, 1946 to July 14, 1946 as chairman of the KPD parliamentary group. He was then elected to the state assembly that advised the constitution (Greater Hesse) , where he held office from July 15, 1946 to November 30, 1946 as parliamentary group leader of the KPD and vice-president of the state assembly. He signed the constitution of the state of Hesse for his parliamentary group .

In the first electoral term of the Hessian state parliament from December 1, 1946 to June 30, 1949, he was a member of the state parliament as chairman of the KPD state parliamentary group. After his departure, Ludwig Keil took over his duties.

Leo Bauer was a freelancer for the Frankfurter Rundschau and publisher of the journal Wissen und Tat .

Conviction by a Soviet military tribunal

The SED summoned Leo Bauer to East Berlin in 1949 . He became editor-in-chief of the Deutschlandsender and joined the SED. A year later he fell victim to a political cleansing as part of the Noel Field affair. The Ministry for State Security (MfS) arrested him on August 23, 1950, and the SED expelled him on September 1, 1950 along with Paul Merker and many others. Handed over to the Soviet secret police MGB by the Stasi, a Soviet military court sentenced him and Erica Wallach to death as "US spies " in a secret trial on May 28, 1952 . In contrast to many other victims of the Noel Field campaign, Leo Bauer was not executed , but pardoned in 1953 for 25 years in a camp in Siberia .

In 1990 Leo Bauer was rehabilitated by the PDS in relation to expulsion from the party .

Adviser to Willy Brandts

In 1955 he was released from camp detention and deported to the Federal Republic of Germany. Here Leo Bauer joined the SPD and worked as a journalist. He was the political editor of Stern and, since 1968, editor-in-chief of the SPD bimonthly Die Neue Gesellschaft .

In the 1960s he worked as a consultant to Willy Brandt. He lived in Oberursel .

literature

• Jochen Lengemann : The Hessen Parliament 1946–1986 . Biographical handbook of the advisory state committee, the state assembly advising the constitution and the Hessian state parliament (1st – 11th electoral period). Ed .: President of the Hessian State Parliament. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-458-14330-0 , p. 204–205 ( hessen.de [PDF; 12.4 MB ]).
• "... towards democracy": The minutes of the advisory state committee of Greater Hesse in 1946. Documentation. Edited by Bernhard Parisius and Jutta Scholl-Seibert. Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 3-930221-05-5 , p. 31.
• Manfred Wilke in: Hans-Joachim Veen (Hrsg.): Lexicon of opposition and resistance in the SED dictatorship. Propylaeen, Berlin, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-549-07125-6 , p. 63.
• Gerhard Beier : Labor movement in Hessen. On the history of the Hessian labor movement through one hundred and fifty years (1834–1984). Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-458-14213-4 , pp. 366-367.
• Jochen Lengemann: MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , pp. 62-63.
• Terrible accent . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1970, pp. 30 ( online ).
• Karin Hartewig, Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Bauer, Leo . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Klaus Jochen Arnold : Return to Siberia or power. The fate of the KPD functionary, SPD politician and journalist Leo Bauer. In: Markus Behmer (Ed.): German Journalism in Exile 1933 to 1945: People, Positions, Perspectives; Festschrift for Ursula E. Koch . Münster: Lit, 2000, pp. 331–353

Web links

• Bauer, Leopold. Hessian biography. (As of February 19, 2018). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lothar Hornbogen: Political Rehabilitation - A Lesson from Our History