Antifa school

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antifa school was a short name for the anti-fascist front schools that were set up for prisoners of war in the Soviet Union on the initiative of the Comintern during World War II .

history

The first Antifa school was founded in Oranki in May 1942 and relocated to the prisoner- of- war camp in Krasnogorsk near Moscow in early 1943 . Another school opened in June 1943 in the Juscha POW camp , which was about 120 kilometers northwest of the city of Gorky, today's Nizhny Novgorod . In literature it is often referred to as the “Taliza” anti-fascist school because it was housed in a satellite camp in the village of Talitsy ( Russian Талицы ). This Talitsa should not be confused with the town of Talitsa in Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals .

Walter Ulbricht named one of the most important training goals : "The stay in the camp must become a school for the German soldiers so that as many as possible return to Germany as anti-fascist fighters."

After the dissolution of the Comintern, Institute No. 99 , the secret governing body of the National Committee Free Germany founded in July 1943 , took over the management of the schools. Both schools worked until 1949 and 1950. By 1946, more than 8,000 prisoners of war from Germany and Austria and the former allies Romania and Hungary completed the courses of three to four months each. The lecturers were primarily communist emigrants or deserters , and later graduates from the Antifa schools. While the focus was initially on an anti-fascist-democratic future for Germany and the other countries, from 1945 their Marxist-Leninist development was in the foreground.

Later other front schools as well as the SMAD schools for employees of the municipal and state administrations in the Soviet occupation zone , such as the one in Rüdersdorf near Berlin , were designated as antifa schools.

The graduates of the Antifa schools later often performed important functions in the GDR , while they were met with great distrust in the FRG and Austria.

Well-known alumni of the Antifa schools

literature

  • Jörg Morré: Behind the Scenes of the National Committee: The Institute 99 in Moscow and the German policy of the USSR 1943–1946 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2001; therein p. 117 ff .: Administration of the Antifa schools ...
  • Jan Foitzik: Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) 1945–1949 . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1999; therein p. 195 ff .: Antifa schools
  • Heike Bungert: The National Committee and the West. The reaction of the Western Allies to the NKFD and the Free German Movements 1943–1948 . Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1997.
  • Martin Broszat , Hermann Weber (Ed.): SBZ manual . Oldenbourg, Munich 1993; therein p. 35 ff .: Antifa schools

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. See the note from Jörg Morré: Behind the Scenes of the National Committee: The Institute 99 in Moscow and the German policy of the USSR 1943–1946 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, p. 118.