Alexander Weißberg-Cybulski

Alexander Weißberg-Cybulski

Alexander Weißberg-Cybulski (born October 8, 1901 in Krakow , Austria-Hungary , today Poland , † April 4, 1964 in Paris ) was a Polish-Austrian physicist, author and businessman of Jewish origin. His testimony in the David Rousset trial against Les Lettres françaises and his book Witches' Sabbath contributed significantly to publicizing the character of Stalinist terror .

Life

Alexander Weißberg was the son of an Orthodox Jewish businessman. In 1902 the family moved to Vienna . Alexander Weißberg studied technical physics, joined the social democracy, and after July 15, 1927 the communists. After obtaining his engineering degree from the Vienna University of Technology (1929), he worked briefly as an engineer in Argentina and as an assistant to Wilhelm Westphal at the Berlin University of Technology. Weißberg was appointed to the UFTI (Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute) in Charkow in 1933. In the spring of 1936, Weißberg was arrested and caught up in the Great Terror . Despite his Austrian citizenship and the interventions of well-known friends such as the couple Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie as well as Albert Einstein , Weissberg was only released by the NKVD in 1940 , but handed over to the Nazi authorities in occupied Poland due to the German-Soviet pact of assistance.

Weissberg survived the war essentially with the papers of Count Cybulski, who was in the USA, which were made available to him by his wife, his partner. After the war, Weissberg worked as a businessman in Paris.

In 1950 , at the trial of the journalist David Rousset against the communist magazine Les Lettres françaises , which denied the existence of the gulag and accused Rousset of lying, Weissberg's testimony and the fact that the famous physicists intervened in his favor attracted a lot of attention. Weißberg subsequently wrote his book Hexensabbat (German new edition under the title Im Verhör 1993, Europaverlag, Vienna), which is characterized by high analytical precision in the description of Stalinist terror. As in the Kravchenko trial shortly before that, the Soviet mass terror denied by the PCF became the subject of Western European judicial proceedings.

Based on descriptions by Joel Brand and referred to as "joint work", Weissberg wrote his life story, which appeared in 1956 in the Federal Republic of Germany under the title The Story of Joel Brand .

Fonts

• Witches' Sabbath. Russia in the melting pot of the purges. Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, Frankfurt am Main 1951. New edition under the title Im Verhör. Europaverlag, Vienna 1993
• The story of Joel Brand. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1956
• The story of Joel Brand. Or, Tel Aviv 1968

literature

• Halina Nelken: I still want to experience freedom. Krakow diary. Bleicher Verlag, Gerlingen 1996, ISBN 3-88350-732-6
• Robert Schediwy: A Century of Illusions: Economy, Politics and Culture in the 20th Century. Salzwasser, Bremen 2008, ISBN 3-86741-090-9 .
• Weissberg-Cybulski, Alexander . 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 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander Weißberg-Cybulski in the catalog of the German National Library