Alfred Kattner

Alfred Kattner (born September 23, 1896 in Schwiebus ; † February 1, 1934 in Nowawes ) was a German party functionary of the KPD . Until his arrest by the Gestapo, he was the courier and companion of the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann , a contact man to other party leaders and to the military-political apparatus (M or AM apparatus) of the KPD . After his arrest on March 3, 1933, he became a defector and was responsible for the arrest of Hermann Dünow and Karl Langowski , among other things . Publicly branded a traitor by the now illegal KPD in early 1934, Kattner was murdered by Hans Schwarz on behalf of the KPD's secret apparatus.

Life

The trained carpenter Kattner, who came from a working-class family, took part in the First World War from 1916 to 1918 . After the November Revolution he became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1920 . In 1932 he was a technical assistant in the party's central secretariat in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus in Berlin, initially reporting to Herbert Wehner , until in 1933 the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann made him his personal escort, technical assistant and secret courier. Kattner was arrested by the Nazi authorities on March 3, 1933 when he was visiting Thälmann's secret quarters. The KPD chairman had already been arrested there shortly before. First he was imprisoned in the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz and in the Spandau police prison and later brought to the Sonnenburg concentration camp . In August 1933 he was transferred to the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse , made submissive through torture and promises, disclosed information about the KPD leadership and agreed to cooperate. As a result, Kattner participated in the arrest of Thälmann's successor John Schehr on November 9, 1933.

The Gestapo released Kattner on November 15, 1933 with the task of infiltrating the KPD leadership as an informant. This was made easy for him, although Wehner had become suspicious. Through a receipt from Thälmann, the party learned of a confrontation with Kattner as a witness in the planned Thälmann trial, and the arrests of Hermann Dünow in December 1933 and Rudolf Schwarz in early January 1934 were obviously due to Kattner. The KPD had also become aware that Thälmann's former companion was to testify at the planned trial about the murders on Bülowplatz .

In January 1934, Kattner was denounced as a traitor in the illegal newspaper Die Rote Fahne . In the meantime, statements by Rudolf Schwarz made it clear to the Gestapo that they could no longer use Kattner as a lure spy. After the KPD's defense failed to get Kattner out of the country and into the Soviet Union , they decided to eliminate him through Fememord . Kurt Granzow and Hans Schwarz had already made meticulous preparations for this on behalf of Rudolf Schwarz . Hans Schwarz shot Kattner in his Nowawes apartment.

consequences

In retaliation and to deter the KPD from further murders, the Gestapo shot the communist functionaries John Schehr, Rudolf Schwarz, Erich Steinfurth and Eugen Schönhaar on the same day in the neighboring Düppeler Forest . The murder was then euphemistically portrayed in Nazi parlance as a shooting “on the run”.

However, the deterrent effect did not materialize on the illegal KPD. The party refrained from further fememembers , but realized that only an improvement in the conspiracy against the network of informers of the Nazi authorities and the organizational weaknesses in their own ranks would help.

literature

• Kattner, Alfred . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Ronald Sassning : The arrest of Ernst Thälmann and the "Kattner case" . Helle Panke, Berlin 1998 (= Pankower lectures, issue 11/1)
• Ronald Sassning: Thälmann, Wehner, Kattner, Mielke. Difficult truths . Utopie Kreativ, No. 114 (April 2000), pp. 362-375

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thälmann, Wehner, Kattner, Mielke. Difficult truths . Article by Ronald Sassning in Utopie Kreativ , issue 114, April 2000, pp. 362–375 ( PDF file; 112 kB)