Anti-military apparatus
The Antimilitary Apparat , also Military Apparat ( M-Apparat ), Department of Military Policy ( AM-Apparat ) or Der Apparat , was the intelligence service of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that existed from 1920 to 1937 .
The intelligence service was initially controlled and financed by the Communist International (Comintern) and later by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
The anti-military apparatus was supposed to prepare for a communist overthrow in Germany in the early 1920s. From 1925 onwards he turned into a secret network that monitored the functionaries and members of the KPD.
After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, the apparatus became an espionage organization under Soviet influence that reported directly to the CPSU and the Red Army of the Soviet Union and acted independently of the leadership of the KPD. The intelligence service did not succeed in building up an effective resistance against the National Socialists in Germany.
In 1937 the apparatus was smashed by massive search pressure from the National Socialist authorities and by severe criticism of the exile leadership of the KPD around Walter Ulbricht , and its senior members were accused and often murdered in Soviet exile. During the time of the Stalinist purges in the Great Terror , findings of the intelligence service often became material to incriminate officials and members of the KPD in exile.
After the Second World War , many former activists of the apparatus became founders and employees of the intelligence services of the early German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Made in 1920
The so-called apparatus of the KPD developed after the resolutions of the 2nd World Congress of the III. (Communist) International (Comintern), in which the communist parties were urged to form not only public and legal mass organizations but also illegal apparatuses for special actions and explicitly “to prepare for armed uprisings”. All sections were obliged to “create a parallel organizational apparatus which, at the decisive moment, will help the party to fulfill its duty to the revolution”. In fact, this was the call for an underground organization to be set up.
The first head of the KPD apparatus, which was controlled and financed by the Comintern, was Hugo Eberlein , a founding member of the Comintern.
The apparatus comprised various departments for the military, intelligence and reconnaissance, as well as decomposition. The departments were named M, N and Z apparatus. The military apparatus was also called the anti-military apparatus for camouflage reasons. The first head of the military department was Hans Kippenberger .
In addition to his main task of gathering information, his field of activity was expanded from the mid-1920s to the surveillance of unwanted party members and the secret gathering of information for the Soviet Union. The German apparatus was directly bound by the instructions of the Soviet secret service GPU and the Soviet military secret service GRU .
In the late 1920s, the number of active members of the KPD apparatus was around 4,300. The KPD had about 130,000 members at the same time. There were also other secret apparatuses such as the passport department, party self-protection and the weapons and ammunition stocks department.
From 1923 to autumn 1924 , the terrorist apparatus or T apparatus, which opponents also called the German Cheka , existed under the head of Woldemar Rose , camouflage name Petr Alexandrowitsch Skoblewski . In the Cheka trials of 1924/25, which received international attention, the KPD leadership distanced itself from the group's terrorist actions.
Hamburg uprising
Leading members of the apparatus were involved in the planning of the Hamburg uprising in October 1923, including the head of the apparatus, Kippenberger.
The attitude towards an armed insurrection attempt in Germany was controversial within the communist movement. While influential members of the Comintern endorsed it, the KPD leadership was against an uprising. The exact motives of the small Hamburg group have not yet been fully clarified.
The former KPD functionary and employee of the apparatus Erich Wollenberg wrote in retrospect that the Hamburg uprising had been planned as a test balloon for an all-German revolution and had been ordered by the Comintern. The KPD leadership had not been inaugurated. A local uprising should “feel with the sword” whether a revolutionary situation exists in Germany. Should the uprising lead to a mass uprising, the KPD would give the signal for an armed uprising. Should the survey fail to take place, the KPD would emerge from the situation without major damage. The uprising failed and collapsed after just a day. However, the events favored the rise of one of the leaders of the rebels, the later KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann .
Resistance to National Socialism
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From 1927 Kippenberger reorganized the apparatus and was arrested in 1928 during the Reichstag election campaign . After his election, however, he had to be released as a member of parliament due to his immunity. He belonged to the Reichstag until 1933 and was still head of the apparatus and from 1929 a candidate of the Central Committee of the KPD. In addition, from 1932 onwards, Kippenberger built a network for operational reporting, the so-called "BB-Ressort", which was independent of the apparatus and had around 300 members. The National Socialists described this network as the “most dangerous apparatus of the KPD”.
In August 1931, along with Heinz Neumann , Kippenberger was the main commissioner of the police murder on Berlin's Bülowplatz . As of September 1933, he was therefore wanted in a wanted list.
In March 1933 communist activity in Germany was banned and all activities of the party were therefore illegal. By 1935 all public party structures had been smashed and over a thousand functionaries were arrested in Berlin alone.
After Thälmann and many others were arrested, there were wars in the direction of the KPD leadership that did not subside, even after massive Soviet influence. As exile leaders, Walter Ulbricht and Franz Dahlem prevailed, who initially organized the illegal party work from Prague . However, neither of them had access to the apparatus, which was directly subordinate to the Politburo of the CPSU via its own communication channels . He had especially the party operating illegally in front of the secret police to protect (Gestapo), undercover agents to unmask, to obtain information from German power centers and secret military and defense information for Soviet services.
Because of the constantly increasing search pressure from the National Socialist authorities, which succeeded in infiltrating the apparatus on several occasions, and the conflicts with the exiled leadership of the KPD, the apparatus did not succeed in realizing an effective resistance against National Socialism in Germany. From 1933 onwards, hundreds of members of the apparatus were exposed, arrested and interned in concentration camps , and many were murdered. Others managed to flee abroad, mostly to the Soviet Union.
resolution
In the ongoing conflicts among KPD functionaries in exile, Kippenberger showed himself to be an opponent of Ulbricht. He tried to turn Kippenberger off and bring the machine under his control. Before he left for Prague in 1935, Ulbricht applied to Moscow for an investigation into the work of the intelligence service and the conduct of his boss. Ulbricht said that Kippenberger was spreading “rumors that dismantle the party”. At the same time, he referred to shortcomings in the work of the intelligence service.
Other functionaries such as Herbert Wehner had already criticized the work of the apparatus. Links to party districts would only exist sporadically. The correct lessons are not being learned from arrests. There are too few informants in the Gestapo to organize effective defense work as a preventive measure.
The investigation requested by Ulbricht began in January 1935. A commission formed for this purpose included the KPD functionary and later GDR politician Wilhelm Pieck . In February 1935 he accused Kippenberger of "insufficient adjustment of the apparatus to the illegal conditions of the party". Kippenberger was blamed for the party's decline.
On April 22, 1935, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow passed a resolution on the further activities of the intelligence service. It called for the defense work to be stepped up. The service was obliged to control the way of life and the political activities of the German party functionaries in Germany and in emigration more effectively. He was also given the right to object to the use of officials in responsible positions.
Kippenberger was ordered to move his seat to Prague. The Politburo did not comply with Ulbricht and Dahlem's demands that the intelligence service be placed under them. In July 1935 Dahlem stated: “(...) we do not agree with one point. That is the relation of the apparatus to the management, to the pole office. We do not agree that it says that the apparatus gets its directives from Moscow (...) We have no desire to take responsibility in Prague if we are not in control and give the political directives. "
At the KPD's Brussels conference in October 1935 in Kunzewo near Moscow, Pieck and Ulbricht finally prevailed as leaders of the KPD in exile. Your internal party critics were relieved of all functions. The apparatus was again heavily criticized and accused Kippenberger of having withdrawn from the influence of the party and made the intelligence service an instrument of factional struggles within the party. In addition, the apparatus was suspected of being penetrated by enemy agents. This was followed by the deselection of Kippenberger and other leading functionaries of the apparatus who were appointed to Moscow. The Comintern took over the further investigations.
The following report by the cadre department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (EKKI) names actual weaknesses in the work of the KPD intelligence service and criticizes the lack of guidance and control by the Politburo or other agencies. But it also contains baseless accusations, such as the accusation that the apparatus did not adequately protect the KPD chairman Ernst Thalmann from his arrest. There is also the accusation that the intelligence work has gone “far too much into the field of outspoken espionage”, which “no longer corresponds to the interests of the party”. The fact that the Soviet military secret service constantly urged the KPD to engage in military and armaments espionage is suppressed. It was called for the KPD apparatus to be used more intensively in the future for the "systematic review of the management and officials". He had to “promote and monitor the unity of the party”.
The report was discussed in the Politburo on March 19, 1936. In this meeting, the Politburo reiterated the view that the news apparatus bore decisive responsibility for the complicated situation of the KPD, and subsequently dissolved it in 1937. The majority of the employees of the apparatus in the USSR were arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to long camp imprisonment and, in many cases, to death.
The Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Kippenberger guilty of spying for enemy intelligence services and of belonging to a terrorist group. Ernst Thalmann's former close confidante was murdered in Moscow on October 3, 1937.
In the coming months of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, which also led to the persecution of thousands of German communists living in exile in the Soviet Union, materials previously prepared by the intelligence service served in many cases as the basis for allegations against party members.
aftermath
Many historians regard the KPD apparatus as the ideological forerunner of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the GDR, which made great efforts to monitor the population of the GDR and employed over 90,000 full-time and more than 100,000 unofficial employees in the late GDR . Kurt Koszyk describes him as a “forerunner of the security doctrine of the SED and the MfS”.
The historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk writes about the MfS: “It was a secret police whose characteristic was the work inside the national territory and not controllable except by their clients. The work and structures were fed from the experiences of the Soviet secret police as well as from the secret structures established in the KPD apparatus in the 1920s. "
Many former active members of the apparatus became employees of the MfS and the secret services of the GDR.
literature
- Bernd Kaufmann: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 , Berlin Dietz Verlag, 1993.
- Hans-Rainer Sandvoss : The »Other« Reich Capital: Resistance from the Labor Movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 , Lukas Verlag, 2007.
- Erich Wollenberg : The Apparatus - Stalin's Fifth Column , Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 1951.
- Bernd Kaufmann: Getting caught in the mill of factional struggles , Berlin 1997. ( online )
- Hermann Weber : The Stalinization of the KPD - Old and New Assessments , 2007. ( online )
- Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. An overall presentation , 2016.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from Peter Lübbe: Communism and Social Democracy , JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin / Bonn 1978, ISBN 3-8012-1113-4 , p. 52 f.
- ↑ Erich Wollenberg: The Apparatus - Stalin's fifth column , 1952, p. 14 f.
- ↑ Ruth Fischer : Stalin and German Communism. With a preliminary remark by Klaus Kinner . Vol. I: From the emergence of German communism to 1924 . Vol. II: The Bolshevikization of German Communism from 1925 . 2 vol. [1948], Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-320-01635-0 .
- ↑ Michael Rohrwasser : The Stalinism and the renegades: The literature of the ex-communists. Metzpler study edition , Springer-Verlag, Hamburg 2016. ( online )
- ↑ Erich Wollenberg : The Hamburg uprising and the Thälmann legend , in: Jens Johler (Ed.): Black Protocols, No. 6 , Berlin, October 1973, p. 9 Black Protocols No. 6 , PDF document, Papiertiger Archive Berlin .
- ^ Compare Walter Ulbricht's letter to Wilhelm Pieck of March 28, 1935 , In: Foundation Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR in the Federal Archives , ZPA, I 2/3/283.
- ↑ Compare proposals to the Politburo on the work of the military-political department , In: Minutes of the PB meetings of April 17 and 22, 1935 , Foundation Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR in the Federal Archives , ZPA, I 2/705/4.
- ^ In: Foundation archive of the parties and mass organizations of the GDR in the Federal Archives , ZPA, I 2/3/18.
- ↑ Compare the report on the investigation of the KPD's military-political apparatus of February 10, 1936, In: Bundesarchiv , P ZC 71/3.
- ↑ Kurt Koszyk: Review of Bernd Kaufmann, Eckhard Reisener, Dieter Schwips, Henri Walther: The KPD's intelligence service 1919-1937 , University of Marburg, 1993. ( online )
- ↑ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: "Not being able to trust is a burden for East Germany to this day" In: Berliner Zeitung , Berlin February 1, 2021. ( online )
- ↑ Ronald Sassning: Thälmann, Dünow, Wehner, Mewis. From the Kippenberger apparatus to the Mielkes IM system In: UTOPIE Kreativ , issue 114 to 116, April to June 2000. ( online )