Arno Wend

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Arno Wend (born August 3, 1906 in Dresden , † March 8, 1980 in Wiesbaden ) was a German politician ( SPD ). Arrested in 1933 and 1948 on charges of continuing an illegal party, he spent a total of eight years in political imprisonment, from 1933 in National Socialist prisons and from 1948 in Soviet prisons and camps.

Life

Arno Wend was born in Dresden in 1906 as one of two children of a locksmith. He spent his childhood in Dresden , where the family had moved before the First World War . After attending primary school , the trained lawyer and notary's clerk worked from 1926 to 1933 as a clerk and then as a department head at the Dresden employment office. Politically, he was first involved in the Socialist Workers' Youth , from 1925 in the SPD and with the Young Socialists . The rhetorical and organizationally talented man quickly made a career within the Jusos - from 1929 as chairman of the Dresden-East Saxony district and as a member of its imperial leadership. Two years later he was elected to the district executive committee of the SPD Dresden-East Saxony. A few months before the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he succeeded in becoming the youngest member of the Dresden city parliament. Shortly afterwards he was disciplined professionally and taken to the Hohnstein concentration camp in June 1933 . Released a few weeks later, he joined an illegal Dresden SPD organization, was arrested again in November 1933 and sentenced to several months' imprisonment by the Saxony Special Court in March 1934. After years of unemployment and forced professional wandering, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940 . In 1945 he was briefly captured by the Americans .

post war period

In the summer of 1945 he was one of the SPD's great hopes in Dresden and Saxony. As SPD chairman and subdistrict manager of Dresden and as an influential state politician, he was one of the unity skeptics, but participated in the forced unification of the SPD and KPD into the SED . As one of several SED state secretaries, he subsequently tried to preserve social democratic traditions , but failed because of the earlier KPD cadres and the occupying power . Removed from his post as an "enemy of unity" in September 1946, he was also expelled from the party in 1947 because of his public appearance in favor of a separation of powers in the Saxon constitution . However, he retained his mandate as Dresden city councilor, which he had acquired in September 1946, and became an intern in the CDU parliamentary group. At the same time he made conspiratorial contact with the east office of the SPD . As an illegal member of the Berlin SPD, as managing director of the Agricultural Viehzentral-Genossenschaft Sachsen, he organized resistance against the new party dictatorship with Dresden like-minded people . So he kept in touch with important like-minded comrades in Saxony, wrote texts for western magazines and leaflets and provided information on political developments to the East Office of the SPD. On July 7, 1948, he was arrested by members of the German police in his Dresden apartment and handed over to the Soviet secret service a short time later . From Dresden the occupying power transferred him to the central prison of the NKVD in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in autumn 1948 . In order to force him to make far-reaching confessions, he was tortured here in nightly interrogations and thrown into prison several times. Because of these experiences he tried in vain to take his own life. On April 20, 1950, the Soviet military tribunal of the Berlin garrison sentenced him to 25 years in a labor camp. He was then taken to the Vorkuta work camp of the Gulag , from which he was released in the course of the de-Stalinization at the end of 1955.

Fled to the Federal Republic of Germany at the beginning of 1956 , until his retirement he worked on GDR refugee affairs in the Hessian Ministry of the Interior. During this time he was also active as an SPD city councilor in Wiesbaden, as chairman of the Wiesbaden Volksbühne, as a member of the inmate advisory board of the SPD party executive and as a labor judge in Frankfurt am Main . In connection with his retirement in 1971, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class, for double persecution in two dictatorships and for his contribution to democracy . In 1980 Arno Wend died in Wiesbaden. In 1995 he was posthumously rehabilitated as a "victim of political repression" by the Russian Attorney General.

Publications

  • The path from the National Socialist dictatorship to Bolshevik oppression (memories 1944–1955) , in: Archive of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial.
  • This is how the SED came into being. Considerations of a victim of the forced unification between KPD and SPD in the Soviet Zone , in: Die Neue Gesellschaft, special issue, May 1, 1969, year 16, pp. 23-28.
  • The interrogation. In Hubertus Knabe (Ed.): Captured in Hohenschönhausen. Stasi prisoners report. Berlin 2007, pp. 79-87.
  • Interview with AW, SPD sub-district secretary in Dresden , in: Beatrix Bouvier / Horst-Peter Schulz: “... but the SPD has ceased to exist” - Social Democrats under Soviet occupation , Bonn 1991, pp. 227–250.

literature

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Wend, Arno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD) and victim of political persecution during the Nazi era and the GDR dictatorship
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 1980
Place of death Wiesbaden