Erich Birkenhauer

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Erich Birkenhauer (born January 21, 1903 in Essen , † September 11, 1941 in Orjol ) was a German journalist and politician of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1932/33 he was the political secretary of the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann . In 1937 he was arrested by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR (NKVD) in Soviet exile in the Moscow Hotel Lux for denouncing Herbert Wehner and shot in 1941 . In 1958 Birkenhauer was posthumously rehabilitated .

Life

Birkenhauer visited after the elementary school until 1922 a teacher training college in Essen, which he left without a degree. In 1919 he became a member of the Free Socialist Youth (FSJ) and in 1924 a member of the KPD, where his brother, Wilhelm Birkenhauer , was already active. At the end of 1925, Birkenhauer became head of the Essen sub-district of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD).

At the beginning of 1928 Birkenhauer began a traineeship at the Niederrheinische Arbeiterzeitung in Duisburg and at the end of 1928 became a political editor . From October 1929 to October 1930 he was charged with “literary treason ” at Gollnow Fortress and in Bielefeld prison . After his release from prison, he became secretary of the Ruhr district leadership of the KPD in November 1930 and from March 1931, as successor to Albert Norden , editor-in-chief of the Ruhr-Echo newspaper .

In May 1932 Birkenhauer moved to Berlin . Along with Werner Hirsch and Heinrich Meyer, Birkenhauer was one of the closest collaborators of the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann and supported the party even after the transfer of power to the National Socialists in January 1933 and the ban on communist activities in illegality. After meeting Herbert Wehner and Sepp Schwab , Birkenhauer was arrested on March 3, 1933.

Birkenhauer was imprisoned in the Berlin police headquarters , in Berlin-Plötzensee and in the Sonnenburg concentration camp until September 22, 1933 . He was called to witness the Reichstag fire trial, but did not appear. Birkenhauer's statement in the preliminary investigation unintentionally incriminated Ernst Torgler .

Birkenhauer emigrated to France in October 1933 , where he was secretary in the exile leadership of the KPD in Paris until February 1935. At the end of 1934 he joined the majority of the Politburo under Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte . Before the VII World Congress of the Communist International and the Brussels Conference in 1935, however, Birkenhauer told Wilhelm Pieck that he was breaking with the “sectarian clique”. In July 1935 Birkenhauer became secretary of the International Thälmann Liberation Committee in Paris. In 1936 he presumably acted - alongside the main author Maximilian Scheer - under an alias as the co-author of the book Das deutsche Volk anklagt , which minutely documented the breaches of law, murders, executions and harmonization measures of the early Nazi regime and against the expansionist tendencies and warlike intentions Hitler's warned. The book was published in German in 1936, and in two French editions in 1937 and 1938.

Birkenhauer was summoned to Moscow in June 1937 to report , but was arrested there in November 1937 as part of the so-called " German Operation " and sentenced on July 21, 1939 to twelve years in a labor camp. Decades later it became known that Herbert Wehner had made serious statements against Birkenhauer and denounced him by “recommending that such 'bad elements' be 'rejected' once and for all”.

During the NKVD detention, Birkenhauer made several applications to leave for Germany. At a renewed trial on September 8, 1941, Erich Birkenhauer was sentenced to death by the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR (MKOG) and taken to the central prison of Oryol . On September 11, 1941 before the withdrawal of were Red Army on Stalin's command 157 prisoners NKVD special units among them Birkenhauer through in a forest shot .

In 1958, Birkenhauer was posthumously rehabilitated by the MKOG.

The translator Anne Birkenhauer is a great niece of Birkenhauer.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the expanded new edition from 2012, edited by Scheer's daughter Katharina Schleier, you can read on the inside title page: “(Original title 1936); Appeared anonymously; written by Maximilian Scheer, with the help of two employees whose name remained unknown, but were probably Erich Birkenhauer and Bruno Meisel. " The German people accuse: Hitler's war against the peace fighters in Germany. A factual report [in the original edition: A book of facts]. LAIKA, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-942281-20-1 .
  2. ^ Fritjof Meyer: Lone wolf among wolves. II In: The mirror. 13/1993.
  3. ↑ Sent to death. In: Focus. 41/2002.
  4. ↑ Andreas Hilger : "Tod Den Spionen!": Death sentences by Soviet courts in the Soviet Zone / GDR and in the Soviet Union until 1953 (= reports and studies. Issue 51). Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism V. at the TU Dresden, 2006, ISBN 3-89971-286-2 , pp. 58–59, (online)
  5. ↑ BStU MfS IX / 11, SV 170/88, Volume 15, Bl. 55 ( Memento of the original of October 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nkwd-und-gestapo.de
personal data
SURNAME Birkenhauer, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD)
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1941
Place of death Oryol