Emil Pietzuch

Emil Pietzuch (born March 9, 1899 in Neurode, Breslau ; † 1943/1944 in the Soviet Union ) was a German communist functionary .

Life and activity

Pietzuch came from poor circumstances. In his youth he learned the carpentry trade . In the last phase of the First World War he was drafted into military service.

Pietzuch settled in Berlin around 1920 . In August 1922 he joined the KPD . In 1924 he took over as head of the decomposition apparatus (target facilities Reichswehr and police) in the Berlin-Brandenburg district as a functionary. At the end of 1925 he was arrested in connection with this activity for disseminating anti-militarist propaganda in the Reichswehr and the protective police and charged with preparing for high treason before the Reich Court in Leipzig : In June 1926 he was found guilty and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

After Pietzuch had already been conditionally released from prison in mid-1927, he went to Mannheim , where he became organ leader of the KPD for the Baden district. In 1928 he returned to Berlin, where he worked in the trade union department of the Central Committee of the KPD. In the same year he took part on VI. World Congress of the Comintern and was elected to various commissions. In 1929 Pietzuch was accepted into the Reich leadership of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO).

In April 1932 Pietzuch returned to Baden as an organ leader. In 1932 and 1933 he was an aspirant at the Moscow M school with the code name Artur (or Franz Artur). At the beginning of 1934 he is said to have been given the task of setting up communist sabotage and terrorist organizations in Germany.

Pietzuch left Germany in 1936 and went to Prague . There he was arrested on charges of having committed espionage to the detriment of Czechoslovakia , but was released again after a short time. At the beginning of 1937 he secretly returned to Berlin, where he took part in the preparation of violent measures to combat the Nazi state. On April 2, 1937, he was seriously injured by an explosion in an accident that he suffered while producing explosives and building ignition devices in his apartment on Kurfürstenstrasse . With the help of like-minded friends, he managed to escape to Prague despite his injuries.

Shortly after the occupation of Rumpftschechei - that part of the Czechoslovak state that had (for the time being) still existed as an independent state after the cession of the Sudeten areas to the German Reich in the Munich Agreement of autumn 1938 - by the German Wehrmacht in March 1939, Pietzchuch fled this in the Soviet Union.

Since the National Socialist police apparatus suspected that Pietzuch had made his abode in Great Britain after his escape from Czechoslovakia, he was ordered in the spring of 1940 by the Reich Security Main Office on the special wanted list GB compiled by this department in the event of a successful invasion of Great Britain should be arrested automatically and primarily by special units of the SS in the event of German occupation of the country.

In Russia, Pietzuch was a victim of the Stalinist purges : on June 22, 1941, he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to five years imprisonment by the military tribunal of the Supreme Court on December 4, 1943. According to the Handbook of the German Communists, he died while imprisoned in a Gulag camp. In the German Democratic Republic , his fate was kept a secret and it was declared that he had parachuted off a parachute near Munich during the war and murdered by the SS.

Web links

• Entry on Pietzuch at the Federal Foundation for the processing of the processing of the SED dictatorship