Erich Hausen

Erich Hausen (born February 5, 1900 in Bad Muskau , † December 19, 1973 in Swarthmore , Pennsylvania ), pseudonyms Ernst Fabel and Charles Bischoff , was a communist politician and anti-fascist resistance fighter .

Life

Coming from a family of craftsmen, Hausen attended elementary school from 1906 to 1914. He then completed an apprenticeship as an electrician at the Osram plant in Weißwasser . At the same time, Hausen attended the technical school in Weißwasser and qualified as an electrician. In this profession he worked for Siemens-Schuckertwerke in 1916/17 . In 1918 Hausen was called in to serve in the war. Most of the time he was stationed in a recruit depot in Belgium, from where he returned to Weißwasser in early 1919. In the same year Hausen joined the German Metalworkers Association (DMV) and the USPD . For the USPD he initially took over the local and soon after the sub-district chairmanship in Weißwasser. After the unification of the USPD Left and KPD at the end of 1920, Hausen joined the KPD and became local editor of the party newspaper Rote Fahne der Lausitz in Cottbus . A little later, at the age of only 21, Hausen became a candidate for the central committee of the KPD. A year later, the delegates of the 8th KPD party congress elected him to the central committee, the party's highest governing body. In 1922 Hausen was elected to the Lusatia KPD district leadership. At the end of this year he was also Polleiter of the Lausitz party organization. After the Hamburg uprising in 1923, the police arrested Hausen in December of the same year. He was sentenced to three years in prison by the State Court in Leipzig on charges of attempted high treason , but was given an amnesty at the end of 1925.

Initially Secretary of the Red Aid for Thuringia , Hausen became Polleiter of the KPD in 1926 for the Silesia district in Breslau . In 1927 he became a candidate for the Central Committee (ZK), and at the 1928 party congress he was elected to the Central Committee of the KPD. Together with Heinrich Galm , he represented the positions of the “right-wing” or union- related party wing around August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler on this executive committee . After the Wittorf affair , which led to the short-term removal of Ernst Thälmann from the party chairmanship, Hausen, who had called for Thälmann to be excluded from the party and who was (falsely) suspected of having leaked internal material about the corruption in the Hamburg KPD to the Lenin League , was released at the end of 1928 excluded from the party. Hausen was now one of the founding members of the Communist Party Opposition (KPO), published its theoretical magazine Gegen den Strom and was a member of the Reich leadership of the KPO. In 1929 Hausen took on a role in the direct administrative committee of the DMV in Stuttgart , where he coordinated administrative and trade union education work at the local level.

In connection with the takeover of power by the National Socialists, Hausen first fled to Strasbourg after the Reichstag fire and then went to Berlin under the false identity, where he coordinated the resistance work of the KPO together with Robert Siewert and Fritz Wiest . In 1934 Hausen was arrested when crossing the border in Bad Elster and initially held for six months on charges of espionage and foreign exchange smuggling. Since Hausen had a valid French passport (in the name of Charles Bischoff) and did not have any incriminating material with him, he was deported to France, from where he coordinated the KPO activities while living in illegality. In 1938/39 Hausen belonged to the minority in the party who rejected the previous assessment of the KPO, according to which the Soviet Union and the Comintern were reformable, and founded the group Marxist-Internationalists .

Interned in various French camps in 1939 after the outbreak of the war, Hausen managed to flee to the USA in April 1941, where he gathered a discussion group of former KPO and SAPD members around him. Hausen, who had settled in Swarthmore / Pennsylvania and worked there again as an electrician, was only recognized as a political refugee after a lengthy legal battle in 1952.

literature

• Marcel Bois: The tradition is preserved. Communist opposition in Silesia before 1933. In: Cornelia Domaschke u. a. (Ed.): Resistance and loss of home. German anti-fascists in Silesia. (PDF; 1.9 MB), Berlin 2012, pp. 107–123.
• Hausen, Erich. In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Annika Schmidt-Kotsch: Erich Hausen (1900–1973). In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Emigrated metal trade unionists in the fight against the Nazi regime (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 3). Metropol, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-210-7 , pp. 561-566.