Arthur Goldstein

Arthur Goldstein (born March 18, 1887 in Lipine , † June 1943 in Auschwitz ) was a journalist and communist politician .

Life

Goldstein joined the SPD in 1914 , there on the left wing, he joined the USPD in 1917 , later also the Spartakusbund and was one of the founding members of the KPD . There he was considered a supporter of anti-parliamentary positions, was a co-founder of the KAPD in 1920 and represented it for a short time on the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow , and together with Karl Schröder and Adolf Dethmann he was responsible for the party organ, the Communist Workers' Newspaper . Under the pseudonym "Stahl" he was one of the signatories of the draft program of the KAPD, which had been written by Herman Gorter . The first executive committee of the KAPD consisted of Emil Sachs ("Erdmann"), Friedrich Wendel ("Friedrich") and Arthur Goldstein ("Stahl"). Goldstein, along with Schröder and Dethmann, was an energetic opponent of the Hamburg direction and its representatives within the KAPD, Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim , who represented a national communism. At the second party congress of the KAPD from 1. – 4. August 1920 in Berlin-Weißensee Goldstein enforced the separation from the Hamburg direction . The 2nd KI World Congress accepted the KAPD, which resigned in September 1921.

Goldstein was excluded from the KAPD in 1922 together with Karl Schröder as a leading member of the Essen branch . He contacted Paul Levi , worked on his magazine Our Way and rejoined the SPD in 1923.

In Berlin, from 1928, together with Schröder, he formed the social science association founded by Levi in ​​1924 into a council-communist cadre organization , which represented the core of the Red Fighters founded in 1931/32 , where Goldstein acted as an expert on economic issues. At the same time he published in social democratic newspapers such as the Vorwärts and maintained contacts with other left organizations, such as the Trotskyist Left Opposition .

In 1933, after power was transferred to the NSDAP , Goldstein fled to Paris ; After the unsuccessful attempt to establish a foreign leadership of the Red Fighters resistance movement , he joined the Trotskyist IKD , in whose exile leadership he was temporarily a member.

According to the documents available in Auschwitz , Arthur Goldstein was deported on June 23, 1943 in a mass transport of 1,018 Jews from Drancy (France) to Auschwitz. Immediately after arriving on June 25, 1943, he was selected there along with 517 Jews and murdered by the SS in the gas chamber.

Works

• Nation and International. A critical examination of Hamburg's communism . Berlin 1920.

literature

• Olaf Ihlau : The Red Fighters. A contribution to the history of the labor movement in the Weimar Republic and in the “Third Reich”. Meisenheim am Glan 1969, p. 170 f.
• Goldstein, Arthur . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .