Willi Budich

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Willi Budich (around 1933)

Willi Budich (born April 16, 1890 in Sandow near Cottbus , †  March 22, 1938 in Moscow ) (pseudonym Dietrich ) was a German politician ( KPD ). Budich was a victim of Stalinist purges during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union and was shot in 1938.

Life

Budich was born in 1890 as the son of a Sorbian farmer and innkeeper. After attending primary school, he learned the metalworking trade. At a later point in time he studied engineering for five semesters at the Mittweida technical school without obtaining a degree. From 1914 he took part in the First World War as a gunner and was injured several times.

From 1910 Budich belonged to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1917 he switched to the USPD . After the founding of the Spartakusbund in autumn 1917, Budich was in the following months (under the code name Brandt) one of the most active organizers for the Bund in Berlin and a close collaborator of Leo Jogiches . Budich was arrested in March 1918. He was released again by the events of the November Revolution.

After the November Revolution of 1918, Budich organized and headed the " Red Soldiers 'Association " founded on November 15, 1918, and the newspaper "Der Rote Soldat", which called for officers to be excluded from the soldiers' councils.

In December 1918 Budich took part in the fighting that was taking place in Berlin at the time between left-wing revolutionaries and the government's newly formed Freikorps . On December 6, 1918, Budich was seriously wounded in a battle and lost an arm, which is why he was unable to attend the founding party conference of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) held in the same month .

In 1919 Eugen Levine sent Budich to Munich from the KPD leadership in Berlin to take part in the establishment and defense of the Bavarian Soviet Republic , in which he played a leading role as a member of the executive committee (under the code name Dietrich). Levine and Dietrich also had the task of streamlining the organization of the Munich KPD.

In 1920 Budich was co-author of the KPD appeal to the workers during the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch . In the same year he traveled to the Soviet Union , where he received an in-depth military training and on the part of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War took part. After his return to Germany in 1921, Budich was arrested, but was able to escape and return to the Soviet Union. Its role in the communist uprisings in Germany in 1923 has not yet been clarified. It is believed, however, that he was the secret leader of the KPD upper district north-east (Mecklenburg-Danzig) in the early twenties . In the following years Budich lived as secretary of the German department of the International Red Aid (IRH) in Moscow. From 1924 he was director of the first Soviet commercial agency in Vienna under the false name of Gerbilski . In 1929 Budich, who had been married since 1923, returned to Germany. He worked for a while as an editor for the Rote Fahne .

In the Reichstag elections in November 1932 , Budich entered the Reichstag as a Reich election proposal by the KPD , to which he was a member until March 1933. In one of the violent riots in the Reichstag, which were frequent at that time, Budich suffered severe injuries, so that he was henceforth unable to walk.

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " Budich was persecuted as a veteran of the November Revolution and a communist member of the Reichstag. After being temporarily imprisoned in prison and in concentration camps , he emigrated to the Soviet Union via Prague in August 1933 . Mistreatment by members of the SA had meanwhile made Budich permanently visually and hearing impaired.

In 1936 he was arrested in the course of the Stalinist purges on the false accusation of having collaborated with the Gestapo . Budich was sentenced to death on March 22, 1938 and shot on the same day.

In 1955, Budich was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR.

Honors

  • On March 1, 1970, the Aviation Technical Battalion 1 (FTB-1) of the East German NVA in Holzdorf-Ost received the honorary name "Willi Budich".
  • In 1981 a street in Cottbus was named after Willi Budich.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Willi Budich , Stadtmuseum Cottbus, Stadt Cottbus, stadtmuseum-cottbus.de, accessed on February 20, 2018.
  2. ^ Hajo Herbell: Citizens in Uniform 1789 to 1961 , 1969, p. 243.
  3. ^ Karl Retzlaw: Spartakus - Aufstieg und Niedergang, remembrance of a party worker, New Criticism publishing house, Frankfurt 1971, p. 117, ISBN 3-8015-0096-9
  4. ^ Hermann Weber: The founding party conference of the KPD , 1969, p. 312.
  5. ^ Görres-Gesellschaft: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch , 1992, p. 241.
personal data
SURNAME Budich, Willi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dietrich (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Sandow
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1938
Place of death Moscow