Arno Esch

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Memorial plaque in the University of Rostock

Arno Esch (born February 6, 1928 in Memel , † July 24, 1951 in Moscow ) was a liberal politician in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). He was arrested in 1949 and executed in the Soviet Union in 1951 .

Life

Esch grew up in Memel, where he attended the state high school. In 1944 he fled to Mecklenburg with his family. Until April 1945 he was a naval flak helper. In 1946 he began studying law at the University of Rostock . Esch became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). As a youth officer of the LDP, he turned against the central claim of the Free German Youth (FDJ). In 1948 he was elected to the LDP main committee, at the Eisenach party congress in 1949 to the LDP central board. He was a co-author of the LDP's Eisenach program .

Esch was a pacifist and campaigned for the right to conscientious objection . In editorials in the Norddeutsche Zeitung , he advocated socially oriented liberalism , the separation of powers , civil rights and the abolition of the death penalty . His saying caused controversy: "A liberal Chinese is closer to me than a German communist."

In August 1949 he was targeted by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which recognized him as "a danger as a scientist as well as a judge". On October 18, 1949, he was arrested with 13 other young LDP members from Mecklenburg. He was sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal in Schwerin in July 1950 for alleged espionage and the formation of a counterrevolutionary organization under the criminal law of the Russian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and brought to Moscow. He was sentenced on May 26, 1951 again to death and in the July 24, 1951 Lubyanka shot . According to the Russian human rights organization Memorial , his ashes were buried in Moscow's Donskoy cemetery .

On May 30, 1991, Arno Esch was rehabilitated by the Military College of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union .

Honors

The University of Rostock commemorates Esch with a plaque in the foyer of the main building and has named the second largest lecture hall building (the largest after the Audimax) on the Ulmenstrasse campus after him. The building, which opened in 2011, was the target of an attack with gunfire and paint in January 2012. In the Rostock district of Brinckmansdorf , in the Schwerin district of Großer Dreesch and in Schönberg (Mecklenburg) , streets bear his name. The FDP -near Arno-Esch-Stiftung e. V. in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and since 1990 the Arno Esch Prize of the Association of Liberal Academics . The high school Am Tannenberg in Grevesmühlen also has a small memorial plaque for Arno Esch. Since 2016, the Research and Documentation Center of the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on the history of dictatorships in Germany in Rostock has been awarding an Arno-Esch doctoral scholarship to promote comparative research on communism and dictatorship.

The circle of the Rostock LDP university group around Arno Esch included the students Bernhard Korupp and Friedrich-Franz Wiese .

literature

  • Horst Köpke, Friedrich-Franz Wiese: My fatherland is freedom: the fate of the student Arno Esch. Hinstorff, Rostock 1990, ISBN 3-356-00373-9 .
  • Hartwig Bernitt, Friedrich-Franz Wiese: Arno Esch. A documentation. Association of Former Rostock Students (VERS), Dannenberg 1994.
  • Hartwig Bernitt, Horst Köpke, Friedrich-Franz Wiese: Arno Esch. My country is freedom. Association of Former Rostock Students (VERS), Dannenberg 2010.
  • Thomas Ammer : University between democracy and dictatorship. A contribution to the post-war history of the University of Rostock. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1969.
  • Hermann Marx: Liberal Students in the Resistance. Liberal Student Union of Germany, Bonn 1958.
  • Waldemar Krönig, Klaus-Dieter Müller: Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution. University and students in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR 1945–1961. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-8046-8806-3 .
  • Friedrich-Franz Wiese: Sentenced to death! Survival in the GULag. ß-Verlag & Medien GbR, Rostock 2009, ISBN 978-3-940835-18-5 .
  • Short biography for:  Esch, Arno . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the entry for Arno Esch's matriculation . Rostock matriculation portal , accessed on October 29, 2015.
  2. ↑ Gesine Haseloff: Profiles 04/09 GDR injustice state? In 1951, the former Rostock law student Arno Esch was executed for political reasons . ( Memento from February 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Profile: Magazin der Universität Rostock 4/2009, p. 2, ISSN  1866-1440 (pdf; 5.08 MB).
  3. ↑ http://www.ostsee-zeitung.de/rostock/index_artikel_komplett.phtml?param=news&id=3353317 (link not available)
  4. ↑ Research and documentation center at the University of Rostock awards the "Arno Esch grant" for the first time. In: idw-online.de. Retrieved November 16, 2016 .
  5. ^ Arno Esch scholarship - Research and Documentation Center - University of Rostock. In: www.dokumentationsstelle.uni-rostock.de. Retrieved November 16, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Esch, Arno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (LDP), victim of Stalinism
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Memel
DATE OF DEATH July 24, 1951
Place of death Moscow