André Marty (politician)

André Marty as a machinist in the French Black Sea Fleet (1919)

André Marty (born November 6, 1886 in Perpignan , † November 23, 1956 in Toulouse ) was a French communist, politician and journalist. For around 15 years he was one of the most influential functionaries of the Comintern .

Live and act

After an apprenticeship as a boilermaker, the son of a wine merchant went to the Navy. In April 1919 he was a member as a senior engineer of the French Black Sea fleet, which proposed that white troops fight the Red Army to support . This was prevented by a mutiny outside Sevastopol that was supposed to have started Marty. Although his role in this solidarity campaign is controversial, at that time he became the hero of the Soviet Union and communism in general. Sentenced to 20 years in prison but pardoned soon after, Marty joined the French Communist Party in 1923 . He rose to be a member of the National Assembly and a member of the Central Committee. Like many other active anti-militarists, he was sent to prison again around 1927. From 1934 to 1935 he was editor-in-chief of the influential party newspaper L'Humanité .

Marty on his release from Clairvaux prison in Ville-sous-la-Ferté with his brother (1923).

Spanish Civil War

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War , Marty was involved in organizing the first communist volunteers from France to defend Irun . In 1936 he was sent to Spain as an instructor for the Comintern after the decision to set up the International Brigades . The activities of around 2,000 Soviet fighters and "advisors" in the Spanish Civil War primarily served Moscow's geopolitical interests. As the chief political commissioner of the International Brigades fighting against Franco , he gained a particularly strong position. Marty didn't use kid gloves. According to a number of witnesses - such as Gustav Regulator , Ilja Ehrenburg , Ernest Hemingway in Whom the Hour Strikes  - the huge, massive Frenchman stationed in Albacete was sickly power-obsessed, suspicious, irascible, unscrupulous and, to make matters worse, incompetent in military terms. Jason Gurney writes that he never took advice, always spoke in a hysterical tone and ordered executions for the slightest offense . "In short he was a real menace." Marty developed the delusion that " fascist - Trotskyist spies" had infiltrated the International Brigades. Under the impression of the Moscow show trials, he saw it as his duty to expose conspirators and to liquidate them. After the failure of an attack by the XIV International Brigade on December 24, 1936 on the Andújar Front , André Marty appeared at the brigade's headquarters and had the commander of the La Marseillaise battalion , Major Gaston Delasalle , tried before a court martial. He was convicted of espionage and shot. According to the historian Antony Beevor, it is not true that Marty ordered the liquidation of 500 interbrigadists. But he helped to create an atmosphere in the ranks of the International Brigades that was determined by fear of arbitrary executions. Nevertheless, Marty's nickname, butcher of Albacete , seems exaggerated.

Marty was Inspector General of the XI during the Battle of Madrid . International Brigade . The André Marty battalion was named after Marty and was completely wiped out during the battle of the Jarama . In January 1937 he traveled with Manfred Stern (General Kléber) to Moscow, where Comintern General Secretary Dimitrov wanted to assign him a task in Latin America. However, Marty insisted on returning to Spain, where he had to accept control by Palmiro Togliatti . As a result of Togliatti's harsh reports, Marty was placed in command of the XI. International brigade withdrawn. In April 1938, by order of the Central Committee of the PCE, he was expelled from Spain as an undesirable person. The reason was that on March 11, 1938, on the Aragon front , he had left the troops unannounced in an extremely critical combat situation. He then returned to France.

Second world war and end of life

After Franco's victory in 1939, Marty went to the Moscow headquarters of the Comintern and worked there as a secretary and instructor until it was dissolved in May 1943. He was then ordered to Algeria to support the local units of de Gaulle's Free French Armed Forces . After returning to the motherland after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, however, he tried to thwart de Gaulle's provisional government in a revolutionary way. That failed because Moscow did not approve of such overturning plans. Although Marty was re-elected to the National Assembly, his power in the CP dwindled. In 1952 he fell through the Marty-Tillon affair , which the prominent communist functionary and press baron Etienne Fajon had set in motion by claiming that Marty and Charles Tillon (Marty's comrades-in-arms from the days of the Mutiny) were police spies. Marty was deposed as Second Secretary of the Central Committee and soon afterwards (like Tillon) even expelled from the party. It probably no longer suited Moscow and the right wing in the French Central Committee. However, he remained a member of parliament until 1955, when he published a book on the affair that same year. At the end of 1956 he died of lung cancer in his retreat near Toulouse.

A little later, the large shipyard named after Marty on the Southern Bug in the former prisoner-of-war camp 126 Nikolayev , which had belonged to the French company Naval before the October Revolution , was renamed Chernomorskij Sudostroitelnij Sawod (Black Sea Shipbuilding Company). The legend was over.

literature

• Fred Copeman: Reason in Revolt . Blanford Books, London 1948 (His memories as an interbrigadist ).
• André Figueras: Marty sans laisser d'address . Self-published, Paris 1976.
• Jack Jones: Union Man. The autobiography . Collins Publ., London 1986, ISBN 0-00-217172-4 .
• Carlos Serrano: L'enjeu espagnol. PCF and guerre d'Espagne . Messidor, Paris 1987, ISBN 2-209-05870-8 , especially pp. 124-128.
• Claude Pennetier: Thorez-Marty. Paris-Moscou, Moscou-Paris. In: Mikhail Narinski, Jürgen Rohjahn (Eds.): Center and Periphery. The History of the Comintern in the Light of New Documents . IISH, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-6861-121-6 , pp. 203-217 on Marty's character and personality.
• Antony Beevor : The Battle for Spain. The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2006, ISBN 0-297-84832-1 .

References and comments

1. ↑ See remark by Harald Laeuen: André Marty . In: Die Zeit , No. 39/1952
2. ^ Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War. 2nd Edition. ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , p. 153.
3. ↑ Tenerife September 2003 , accessed on May 20, 2011. See also Wikipedia
4. ↑ The ear of Malchus. A life story. Cologne 1958, pp. 368-370 and 430-431. The writer Regulator was political commissioner of the 12th International Brigade during the Spanish War. He was badly wounded when the popular "General Lukacz" ( Máté Zalka ) died.
5. ↑ People years of life. (Memoirs), Munich edition 1962/65, Volume II, p. 474. The writer Ehrenburg was a correspondent for the Moscow daily Izvestia during the Spanish War .
6. ↑ Hemingway's novel about the war in Spain was published in 1940. The US writer, an active sympathizer of the anti-fascists, was also in Spain at the time as a war correspondent. You should be shot over, Andre Marty! In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1952 ( online - excerpt).
7. ↑ Crusade in Spain , 1974. The British fought in the International Brigades. Due to a hand wound, he was no longer able to practice his profession as a sculptor.
8. ↑ Depending on the translation: he was a real danger / plague / land plague ... Quoted from Anthony Beevor: The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2006, ISBN 0-297-84832-1 , p. 161.
9. ^ Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War. 2nd Edition. 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , p. 208.
10. ^ Hugh Thomas : The Spanish Civil War , Ullstein Verlag, Berlin West 1962, p. 271.
11. ↑ See Huber / Uhl 2004 , accessed on May 20, 2011, summing up on page 34, and Walther L. Bernecker: Krieg in Spanien 1936–1939 , Darmstadt 2005, p. 113.
12. ^ Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War. 2nd Edition. 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , p. 250.
13. ↑ See Huber / Uhl 2004 , accessed on May 20, 2011, summarizing on page 34, as well as Walther L. Bernecker: Krieg in Spanien 1936–1939. Darmstadt 2005, p. 19.
14. ↑ Michel Pablo , accessed May 20, 2011.

Web links

Commons : André Marty  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Newspaper article about André Marty in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .