Arthur Ewert

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Arthur Ewert (born November 30, 1890 in Heinrichswalde ; † July 3, 1959 in Eberswalde , also Artur Ewert) was a communist politician. The son of a small farmer emigrated to Canada in 1914 and was deported back to Germany in 1919 because of his political activities. He was one of the founders of the country's first communist party, the Socialist Party of North America. In February 1919 an attempt was made to found a nameable Communist Party, but the meeting was betrayed and broken up by the police; the German couple involved (who called themselves "Everhardt" at this meeting) were arrested. He then made an eventful career in the KPD and was a member of the Reichstag from May 1928 to September 1930 .

Stripped of power in the KPD, the candidate of the Executive Committee of the Communist International became a member of the Latin American office of the Executive Committee of the International in Moscow . In Brazil since 1934 , he was arrested after a communist uprising in Brazil in December 1935 and sentenced to a long prison term. His health seriously damaged by this detention, he was allowed to return to Germany in 1947.

The terminally ill mentally ill lived until 1959 in the Eberswalde state hospital.

Life

Ewert was born as the son of a small farmer from East Prussia who was characterized by a high level of education, which he also passed on to his son. After completing an apprenticeship as a saddler with his uncle in Berlin, Ewert joined the SPD in 1908 . In May 1914 he emigrated to Canada with his partner and later wife Elisabeth Saborowski (1886–1939) , where both socialist groups joined and from 1914 took part in anti-war activities.

In order to avoid the threat of internment as citizens of a hostile state, the couple went into political hiding. They traveled in Canada and the United States and joined the new Socialist Party of North America (SPNA) in 1915. In the party they called themselves "Gustav" and "Elsie" and used false Canadian documents as "Arthur Brown" and "Annie Bancourt".

In the course of the surveillance of communist endeavors that began after the end of the war, the couple were arrested in Toronto in March 1919 and soon deported to Germany, where he joined the KPD that same year. Here he was elected full-time functionary in 1921 and the Central Committee in 1923 and was sent to the Communist International in Moscow for the first time , and he also headed the Hesse party district. During this time he worked closely with Heinz Neumann (1902–1937) and Gerhart Eisler (1897–1968). Since the police wanted him after the Hamburg uprising , Ewert went underground. In the elections to the Saxon state parliament in October 1926, he became one of the fourteen MPs of the KPD. On March 22, 1927, his election was declared invalid by a majority in the state parliament because he had no real place of residence in Saxony. Ernst Scheffler (1891–1954) moved up for him. So Ewert stayed underground until the Reichstag election in May 1928. Because of the good election results, he was one of the 54 KPD members in the Reichstag. After his election, Ewert married his longtime partner Elisabeth Saborowski. To the middle group , then to the current of the Compromisers around Ernst Meyer (1887–1930), Ewert was briefly deputy party chairman after Ernst Thälmann around 1928 due to Meyer's illness , but became after the Wittorf affair and the 12th party congress in 1929 as part of the ultra-left turn of the KPD disempowered.

Although in conflict with the KPD leadership and Stalin's guidelines, Ewert remained in the apparatus of the Communist International in Moscow in 1930 and was temporarily representative of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) at the CPC and in the Comintern's Latin America office in Buenos Aires and Montevideo active; Together with his wife Elisabeth Saborowski-Ewert (nickname: Sabo), he went to Brazil at the end of 1934 as the alleged American couple Berger, where other Comintern employees entered, including the German Olga Benario as the “wife” of the former national leader Captain of the Brazilian Army Luís Carlos Prestes . They were supposed to lead the uprising against the Vargas regime planned in Moscow in November 1935, which failed. Ewert was arrested by the Brazilian police in December 1935 and severely tortured. He also witnessed the torture and rape of his wife, which eventually led to mental illness. The Prestes in hiding were also arrested in 1936.

Szabo and the pregnant Olga Benario were expelled as Germans, handed over to the Gestapo, and arrived in Hamburg at the end of October 1936. Elisabeth Saborowski-Ewert died in 1939 in a punishment cell in the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

On May 7, 1937, Ewert was sentenced to 13 years and 4 months in prison in the one-day main trial of the 35 leaders of the uprising. Attempts by American communists to provide the seriously ill Ewert with an American defense attorney, in cooperation with the US embassy, ​​were prevented by the Brazilian authorities. Only Prestes received a longer sentence at the age of 16, 8 months. Of the other Comintern employees, the Argentine Rudolfo Ghioldi (1897–1985) and - in absentia - the alleged Belgian Leon Vallée received four years' imprisonment. The American radio operator for the Comintern team, Victor Allen Barron, died in custody allegedly of suicide following the group's betrayal. The other Brazilians received only brief sentences. Another trial with 121 defendants also resulted in low sentences; only one young officer was sentenced to death who shot his commander. Thousands, apparently unrelated to the communist coup, had been detained after the coup, had been ill-treated and the legitimacy of their arrest was never judged. Ships were used as makeshift prisons. The Vargas regime used another alleged communist overthrow plan to impose martial law, cancel elections, eliminate all political organizations and establish a dictatorship.

The uprising failed because of a misjudgment of the capabilities and importance of the Brazilian party and of Perstes, the main planner of the coup attempt, to mobilize further supporters. Ewert, who came from China, was only involved in the project at a late stage and recognized the shortcomings of the basic idea too late or did not want to again contradict the line decided in Moscow. Obviously, he couldn't deal with the devastating consequences for his wife.

tomb

In 1942 Arthur Ewert was transferred to a psychiatric clinic. He was pardoned in 1945 and was able to leave for the Soviet Zone in 1947. He spent the last years of his life mentally deranged in the Berlin Charité and then from August 1950 in a sanatorium in Eberswalde / GDR, where he died in 1959. Ewert's urn was buried in the memorial of the socialists in the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin-Lichtenberg . The funeral speech was given by his former close colleague Gerhart Eisler.

literature

  • Ronald Friedmann: Arthur Ewert. Revolutionary on three continents . Dietz, Berlin 2015 ISBN 978-3-320-02319-5 Zugl. Diss. Phil. University of Potsdam , 2015 (this print edition is abbreviated; complete version as PDF file on the author's website)
    • dsb .: Arthur Ewert and Elise Saborowski. Two Germans in the early communist movement of Canada. In: Work - Movement - History . Journal for historical studies, 10th vol. Issue 1, 2011 full text on the author's side, in the version from JahrBuch for research on the history of the labor movement. 2011.
  • David P. Hornstein: Arthur Ewert: A Life for the Comintern . Lanham 1993 ISBN 0-8191-9258-9
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online [accessed August 8, 2011]).

Web links

Commons : Arthur Ewert  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ian Angus: Canadian Bolsheviks. The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada . Trafford Publishing, Victoria, BC 2004, p. 307 ( online )
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Arthur Ewert - Biographical information from the manual of the German communists
  3. ↑ Hornstein: Arthur Ewert , p. 7 - She died of the consequences of abuse in the Ravensbrück concentration camp .
  4. ↑ Hornstein: Arthur Ewert , p. 9 ff.
  5. ↑ Hornstein, p. 11f .: Elisabeth Saborowski was interned in Canada and also deported to Germany in early 1920
  6. ↑ Hornstein, p. 61.
  7. ↑ Friedmann rates this book in his dissertation as follows: In 1993 David P. Hornstein, a former employee of the US secret service CIA, published a book entitled "A Life for the Comintern", which he self-confidently called the "biography" of Arthur Ewert 13 However, Hornstein had not undertaken any research of his own. Rather, he had used, unchecked, everything he found in English-language books and in the files of the US Federal Police FBI, which he could not avoid reading. Hornstein provided a multi-page bibliography, but in the book itself he did not mention any source . Many descriptions are also fictitious. To give just one example, Hornstein gave a detailed report on Arthur Ewert's trip to the USA at the end of 1934, although there is evidence that Arthur Ewert was in Uruguay at the time. P. 10 of the pdf version
personal data
SURNAME Ewert, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ewert, Artur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Heinrichswalde
DATE OF DEATH 3rd July 1959
Place of death Berlin