August Creutzburg

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August Creutzburg (born March 6, 1892 in Fischbach , Thuringia; † September 11, 1941 in Orlow , Soviet Union) was a German communist politician . During the Great Terror in the Soviet Union , he was arrested by the NKVD in 1938 and shot in 1941.

Life

August Creutzburg completed a painter - painter and teaching and entered 1908 in the SPD one. In 1917 he switched to the USPD and from May 1919 was the full-time secretary of the USPD in Thuringia. In 1920 he played an important role in Gotha as commander-in-chief of the 1st Gotha People's Army in suppressing the Kapp Putsch . At the end of the same year he moved with the left wing of the USPD to the KPD , where he was KPD secretary in Jena from December 1920 . In June 1923 Creutzburg was appointed head of the Magdeburg district , which he led as political director from May 1924.

He was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924 , to which he was a member until 1928 and from 1930 to 1933. In August 1924 he became political leader of the KPD district Wasserkante , in October 1925 of the district Niederrhein . At the end of 1925, Creutzburg was a secretary in Thuringia for a time and from the end of 1926 head of the organization in Niederrhein. As commissioner of the Central Committee, he was sent to the Palatinate in autumn 1927 to isolate the ultra-left leadership there. In January 1928 he was temporarily appointed political secretary of the Palatinate district management, and then in August 1928 he was sent to Essen as head of the Ruhr district . In July 1929 Creutzburg was appointed to Berlin . He took over the management of the org department (organizational head of the Central Committee). He remained in this position until March 1933.

1933 after the takeover of the Nazi party , he was initially for a short time instructor in Berlin. Since he did not prove himself in this function, he was sent to emigration. In Amsterdam he had been head of the KPD border post from February 1934. The Dutch police arrested him there on February 4, 1935. After being deported from the Netherlands, he traveled to the Soviet Union via France . Deported to the Volga Republic , he was arrested on February 8, 1938 by the NKVD as part of the Stalinist purges .

August Creutzburg was sentenced to death by a Soviet court on October 28, 1938, but the sentence was commuted to 25 years in a camp. He was sent to a labor camp in the Saratov area. After various petitions regarding the annulment of the judgment, including those to Stalin himself, were unsuccessful, he finally applied to leave for Germany. On September 11, 1941, however, he was shot with hundreds of communists by the NKVD in the forest of Oryol before the German invasion. In 1998 he was legally rehabilitated posthumously .

His partner Clara Vater, the daughter of the German communist Albert Vater , was extradited to Germany together with their daughter Tamara, who was born in September 1937, and was imprisoned there.

Honors

A street in Gotha has been named after August Creutzburg since 1977 and a retirement home since 1987.

literature

  • Katja Haferkorn: Creutzberg, August . In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical Lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 75-76.
  • Klaus J. Becker: The KPD in Rhineland-Palatinate 1946–1956. Von Hase & Koehler, Mainz 2001, ISBN 3-7758-1393-4 ( Publications of the Parliament's Commission for the History of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate 22), (also: Mannheim, Univ., Diss., 1999), p. 426 .
  • Beatrix Herlemann : The emigration as a combat post. The guidance of the communist resistance in Germany from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Hain, Königstein im Taunus 1982, ISBN 3-445-02252-6 ( Mannheimer Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien 18).
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-320-02044-7 , p. 138-139 ( online [accessed April 3, 2020]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Herrmann Weber, Andreas Herbst: German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-320-02044-7 , p. 138-139 ( online [accessed August 9, 2011]).
personal data
SURNAME Creutzburg, August
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Creutzburg, August Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politicians (KPD, SPD, USPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Fischbach / Rhön , Thuringia
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1941
Place of death Orlov