Erich Besser

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Erich Besser (born February 27, 1890 in Aschersleben , † April 5, 1972 in Bernburg (Saale) ) was a German communist . He was a member of the state parliament of the Free State of Anhalt for the KPD , was expelled from this party in 1927 because of deviating from the left and was re-accepted in 1928. During the Nazi era he was temporarily imprisoned in a concentration camp. After the Second World War he held leadership positions in the KPD and SED , but was again excluded in 1950 and sentenced to forced labor in the Soviet Union. In the course of the de-Stalinization he was released again in 1955 and became a member of the SED again.

Life

The son of a master furrier graduated from middle school and then worked as a gardener. Since 1910 he was a member of the SPD and the free trade union German Transport Workers' Association . He began his military service in 1912 and had been a soldier since the beginning of the First World War .

Besser joined the USPD , which was founded in 1917 , and was part of its local leadership in Bernburg in 1919. Within the party, he was a member of the left wing that merged with the KPD to form the VKPD at the end of 1920 . Belonging to the left wing of the party around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow , he became organ leader for the party district Magdeburg-Anhalt and member of the Anhalt state parliament in 1924, and in 1925 he was also a member of the party's political commission. As an opponent of the new party leadership set up in 1925 under Ernst Thälmann , he protested against Werner Scholem's expulsion from the Central Committee and supported the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union . As a result, he lost his party positions at the end of 1925 and was expelled from the KPD in 1927. After he capitulated to the party leadership in 1928, he was re-admitted to the KPD and again in the same year and in 1932 in the Anhalt state parliament.

As a member of the state parliament, in May 1925, on the occasion of budget deliberations on the justice administration budget, Besser submitted a motion from the KPD parliamentary group that Anhalt should campaign for the repeal of the ban on abortion (Sections 218 and 219 of the Criminal Code ) with the Reich government . He also demanded an amnesty for women convicted under Section 218.

After the NSDAP came to power , Besser was imprisoned at the beginning of April 1933 and held in a concentration camp until 1935 . After his release, he opened a grocery store and was imprisoned again in 1944 due to contacts with the resistance group around Martin Schwantes .

After liberation from National Socialism in 1945, he became head of the KPD sub-district Dessau and first vice-president of the Dessau district administration. After the founding of the SED, its Dessau district association was better positioned . In the same year he was elected to the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt , in which he was chairman of the legal and constitutional committee, he was also a member of the SED secretariat in 1947 and chairman of the SED state party control commission for Saxony-Anhalt in 1949 . Better was considered in this function as a tough and irreconcilable politician who demanded "the intensified struggle of progressive forces against [...] elements hostile to the people". In April 1950, at a meeting of the SED regional executive committee, he demanded that all possibly unreliable people be removed from the party's “fortress” and, in particular, that “all Trotskyist elements, all those who see their task in it [...] work in a conciliatory manner to have to, and to stamp out all those who believe that they are falling for social democracy ”.

In the spring of 1950, a party member who felt that Besser had dismissed him denounced him to the SED state leadership. Other old communists, such as Alfred Kettig , supported this denunciation. In 1936 and 1937, Besser was said to have expressed himself positively about Trotsky and negatively about Stalin several times in conversations , and in 1939 described the Hitler-Stalin Pact as a betrayal of Stalin. The facts, however, corresponded more to the fact that he had sympathized with Zinoviev , as Paul Laufer stated. On June 10, 1950, Besser was arrested by the GDR State Security Service , and on July 13, 1950, he was arrested by the Soviet military organs. A military tribunal of SMAD sentenced him for his alleged remarks in the 1930s, on 29 December 1950, 25 years of forced labor. Until his early release in 1955, Besser was imprisoned in a gulag in the Soviet Union . The historian Thomas Klein commented that this shows that the highest party controllers were also exposed to the risk of falling victim to the purge themselves. The historian Frank Hirschinger believes that Besser's fall was primarily due to the “growing danger” in which other party officials “because of his rigorous approach” saw themselves. Because they too often had "dark points" in their résumé and therefore felt threatened by better.

After his release and return to the GDR , Besser insisted on his rejection of the Moscow trials and the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but in 1956 he was "non-publicly rehabilitated" by the Central Committee for the Review of Affairs of Party members and re-admitted to the SED. In 1965 he was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver .

The 1950 verdict against Besser was not overturned by the Russian Federation until 1996, 24 years after his death .

Honors

A street in Bernburg is named after Erich Besser.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elke Stolze: Women Voices. The first women voices from the Saxony-Anhalt region in parliaments of the Weimar Republic . Lecture as part of the event series Generations University of the University of Applied Sciences Harz Wernigerode on March 1st, 2011, p. 13. Online .
  2. ↑ Frank Hirschinger: "Gestapo Agents, Trotskyists, Traitors". Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918-1953 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp. 213f. Digitized on the website of the Bavarian State Library . Hirschinger quotes an article from the freedom of December 12, 1949 as well as the protocol of the state board meeting.
  3. ↑ Frank Hirschinger: "Gestapo Agents, Trotskyists, Traitors". Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918-1953 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp. 214–215, digitized . It was about Franz Dyba, who had applied for the office of Lord Mayor of Koethen and attributed his failure to better behavior.
  4. ↑ Frank Hirschinger: "Gestapo Agents, Trotskyists, Traitors". Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918-1953 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp. 214–216, digitized .
  5. ↑ Thomas Klein: "For the unity and purity of the party". The internal party control organs of the SED in the Ulbricht era . Böhlau, Cologne 2002, p. 123. Digital reprint .
  6. ↑ Frank Hirschinger: "Gestapo Agents, Trotskyists, Traitors". Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918-1953 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, p. 221, digitized .
  7. ↑ Frank Hirschinger: "Gestapo Agents, Trotskyists, Traitors". Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918-1953 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, p. 218, digitized ; Thomas Klein: "For the unity and purity of the party". The internal party control organs of the SED in the Ulbricht era . Böhlau, Cologne 2002, p. 123. Digital reprint .
  8. ↑ Weber, Herbst: Better, Erich .
personal data
SURNAME Better, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD, SED)
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Aschersleben
DATE OF DEATH April 5th 1972
Place of death Bernburg (Saale)