Alfred Falk

Alfred Falk (actually Alfred Cohn ; born February 4, 1896 in Berlin ; † 1951 , probably in Nice ) was a German journalist and pacifist of Jewish origin. Falk was head of the Republican Complaints Office in the Weimar Republic . He was one of 33 Germans who were on the National Socialists' first expatriation list published on August 25, 1933 .

Life

Falk on the expatriation list (1933)

Work in the Weimar Republic

Falk was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1916 during the First World War . In 1918 , Falk, now a law student, refused twice to do military service on the Western Front because he felt this to be criminal. He was then sentenced to prison and was held in solitary confinement in the military prison in Berlin-Tegel .

During the Weimar Republic, Falk was a member of pacifist organizations. In 1922 he was head of the Republican Youth Association Black-Red-Gold , which set up a complaint office for violations of the constitution by authorities and government after the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau .

In October 1924, Falk succeeded in convincing the board of the German League for Human Rights (DLM), of which he was secretary, to establish the complaints office as an independent organization. On the sixth anniversary of the November Revolution , on November 10, 1924, a corresponding association, the Republican Complaints Office , was founded in Berlin . In addition, together with Robert MW Kempner , Falk led the local group Berlin-Nord of the DLM.

Under Arnold Freymuth , Falk became managing director of the Complaints Office, a private institution whose aim was to monitor, comply with and promote the republican constitution and which wanted to report anti-republican efforts to the supervisory authorities. From 1928 to 1930 he was also the editor of Heinrich Kanner's pacifist monthly magazine Der Krieg .

As managing director of the complaints office towards the end of 1930, Falk was counted among the "best-hated people in Germany".

Falk was also on the board of the Berlin branch of the German Peace Society (DFG) between 1929 and 1933 .

exile

After the handover of power to the National Socialists and a few days after the Reichstag fire , Falk fled to Czechoslovakia on March 6, 1933 with his wife Margot (née Langfeld) in order to evade arrest by the SA.

He had previously destroyed the complaints office's documents or brought them to safety. He wanted to prevent the National Socialists from falling into the hands of the confidential information with which citizens had reported anti-Republican behavior. On March 10, 1933, the Berlin Police President banned the Complaints Office.

From Prague Falk and his wife went on to Switzerland, the Saar region and finally to Strasbourg . After they took an apartment there, Falk worked as a journalist a. a. in the German-speaking exile press.

In exile , Falk founded the Ligue Allemande pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, Section Strasbourg , the Strasbourg section of the DLM, together with the journalist and pacifist Berthold Jacob , and became its vice-president. The section maintained contacts with the headquarters of the DLM in Paris, which was headed by Hellmuth von Gerlach , and played a leading role in the Nobel Prize campaign for Carl von Ossietzky ("Save Ossietzky!").

Until the beginning of 1934, Falk also worked for Jacob. In the autumn of 1935, Falk retired to Fréjus in the south of France . At the beginning of the Second World War he was temporarily interned in Toulon and Les Milles . After 1945 he lived in Nice . In 1950 he wrote in a letter to the editor to Die Zeit that he never wanted to enter Germany again, "because the militaristic-nationalistic mentality of large sections of the German people has unfortunately not changed". Falk died in 1951.

reception

Falk received praise for his work as managing director of the Republican Complaints Office from left-wing intellectual writers such as Kurt Tucholsky , who wrote on the Weltbühne in 1928 :

“The Republican Complaints Office must do a very good job, otherwise the right-wing press would not be so excited when they talked about it. There sits someone who knows about the regulations, and what he does has a hand and foot, and the guy gets right too -! One is Alfred Falk, a republican, as many would like. "

According to the historian Otmar Jung, however , “the active Falk” was a “political nobody”, so that the effectiveness of the complaints office was more strongly determined by the commitment of the renowned lawyer Arnold Freymuth .

literature

• Otmar Jung: Private Protection of the Constitution: The Republican Complaints Office e. V. (1924-1933) . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 35th year, January 1987, pp. 65–94, ifz-muenchen.de (PDF).
• Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933, Volume 1: Politics, economics, public life . Edited by Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss . Munich / New York / Paris 1980, p. 166.
• Helmut Donat : Alfred Falk . In: Helmut Donat, Karl Holl (ed.): The peace movement . Hermes Handlexikon, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-612-10024-6 , pp. 106-108.
• Karl Holl: The long road to French citizenship: Alfred Falk (1896–1951) in exile in France . In: Christof Dipper , Andreas Gestrich , Lutz Raphael (eds.): War, Peace and Democracy. Festschrift for Martin Vogt on his 65th birthday. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / Bruxelles / New York / Oxford / Vienna 2001, ISBN 978-3-631-37838-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).
2. ↑ Otmar Jung: Organized Pacifism in the End Phase of the Weimar Republic , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 34th year, April 1986, pp. 207–244, here p. 226 ( ifz-muenchen.de (PDF)); History of the Arnold Freymuth Society ( Memento from May 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ Why Republican Assessment Agency? In: General-Anzeiger für Dortmund , 312, November 12, 1930
4. ^ Letter to the editor from Alfred Falk. In: Die Zeit , No. 17/1950
5. ^ The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945, Volume 1, German Reich 1933–1937 , edit. by Wolf Gruner, Munich 2008, p. 231
6. ^ Kurt Tucholsky: The Republican Complaints Office . In: Die Weltbühne , September 18, 1928, No. 38, p. 459.
7. ↑ Otmar Jung: Private Protection of the Constitution: The Republican Complaints Office e. V. (1924–1933) , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 35th year, January 1987, pp. 65–94, here p. 71.