Alexander Starck

Alexander Starck (born October 5, 1909 in Bromberg ; † March 6, 1963 in Hessenwinkel ) was a German communist and trade unionist. For a time he was the deputy chairman of the Free German Trade Union Federation , the GDR unified union, and thus one of the most important FDGB functionaries in the GDR.

Life

Stark was born in 1909 as the son of a traveling salesman in the Prussian town of Bromberg. He learned the carpentry trade and in 1926 became a member of the KJVD, of which he belonged to the Central Committee office in 1931/32. In 1931 he also joined the KPD. In 1932 the KPD delegated him to a course at the International Lenin School, from which he returned to Germany in 1933 to do illegal political work for the now banned KPD. He was arrested for this in October 1933 and sentenced in 1934 to two and a half years in prison. He served this sentence in Luckau penitentiary. After his release from prison, Stark first emigrated to CSR. When the Sudetenland was annexed by the German Reich in October 1938, Stark fled to Great Britain and settled in Manchester, where he subsequently became a member of the leadership of the local KPD group. As a result of the military conflict between Germany and Great Britain, Starck was interned in 1940 and worked as a lumberjack in North Wales until 1944. During his time in Great Britain, Starck was a member of the Free German Movement, the regional group of German trade unionists in Great Britain and the Free German Cultural Association in Great Britain. After the end of the war he worked as secretary of the emigration office of the Free German Movement. In 1946 Starck returned via Yugoslavia to the former Soviet zone of occupation and quickly found a new field of activity in the FDGB unified union. Starck's KPD membership was taken over into the SED. Initially, he worked as a member of the federal board of the FDGB. As a successor to Max Kiefer, Starck took over the management of the wages and tariffs department at the end of 1948 and thus became a member of the federal executive board. From May 1949, after restructuring the departments of the federal executive committee, he headed the labor and wages department and thus also moved up to the executive board of the federal executive committee. After the death of the 2nd FDGB Chairman Bernhard Göring, Starck also moved up as a member of the Provisional People's Chamber in December 1949. Starck also inherited Göring's functions within the federal executive board. At the 5th meeting of the federal executive committee on April 12 and 13, 1950, he was elected deputy chairman of the federal executive committee of the FDGB and was thus briefly the second man behind Herbert Warnke . In this function, in which he was officially confirmed at the 3rd FDGB Congress, which took place in September 1950, Starck was responsible for the management policy and youth work of the FDGB. In addition to Starck, Rudolf Kirchner was also elected deputy chairman at the congress , but he was responsible for other areas. At the Volkskammer elections in 1950, Starck was nominated as the top candidate of the FDGB for the state of Thuringia and was elected to the GDR parliament. Inside the union, however, Starck was relieved of his position as deputy FDGB chairman in May 1951 because of deficiencies in his work and insufficient self-criticism . However, he initially remained a member of the FDGB federal executive committee. As a result, he also lost his mandate in the People's Chamber, where he was replaced by Rudolf Kirchner from October 1951. Starck was pushed to Torgelow as Labor Director of VEB Bau-Union Nord-Ost. This company was mainly busy with the construction of buildings for the forerunner of the National People's Army, the main training administration. In the course of the events around June 17, 1953, Starck was expelled from the federal executive committee at a meeting of the FDGB federal executive committee in August 1953 because of his attitude towards the workers. The SED subsequently also excluded him from its ranks. The wave of rehabilitation that began in the SED after the 20th party congress of the CPSU also resulted in Starck being re-admitted to the SED. Until his death in 1963 he still worked in the Berlin VEB Bau-Union.

Web links

• Short biography for:  Alexander Starck . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Neue Zeit of April 13, 1950, p. 2