Erich Hoffmann (politician)

Erich Hoffmann (born February 13, 1906 in Zerbst ; † February 14, 1959 in East Berlin ) was a German politician ( KPD ).

Life and work

Erich Hoffmann came from a working-class family. After an apprenticeship as a core maker in Kiel , he moved to Hamburg in 1927 . From 1928 he completed a traineeship at the communist Hamburger Volkszeitung , for which he then worked as an editor until 1932. The Supreme Court convicted him of his against the Weimar Republic -looking items to eleven months imprisonment , which he attributed to the 1931 fortress Gollnow dismounted. After the seizure of power of the Nazis , he was arrested on March 3, 1933 and in Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp mistreated. He was released in June 1933 and was initially head of the banned Red Front Fighters Association in Hamburg, but fled to Denmark that same year . After he was expelled from Denmark in March 1934 because of his work for the Red Aid , he first moved to the Saar region and from there to France in February 1935 . Later he went to Moscow . In May 1937 he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War , for which he initially worked as a tank driver. After suffering a serious head injury near Madrid in July of the same year , he became political commissioner in the medical service. In May 1939 he was arrested on the French border while fleeing Spain , interned in France and extradited to Germany by the Vichy regime in May 1942 together with Kurt Goldstein and Hermann Axen . After he was initially imprisoned in Auschwitz , he was sent to Buchenwald from January to April 1945 .

After liberation from the concentration camp, he returned to Hamburg. From May 1946 to 1950 he worked again as editor-in-chief for the Hamburger Volkszeitung. After the KPD ban , he worked as a freelance journalist. Seriously ill, he moved to East Berlin in 1958 , where he died at the age of 53.

politics

Hoffmann joined the KJVD as a teenager in 1922 , and headed its Hamburg sub-district in 1927/28. He later became involved in the KPD , for which he was a member of the Hamburg parliament from November 1931 to May 1932 . After the Second World War he was involved in the rebuilding of the KPD in Hamburg and was initially agitpropleiter of the KPD-Wasserkante. In 1946/47 he was a member of the Zone Advisory Board for the British Zone of Occupation . In February 1950 he became one of the most influential KPD functionaries in the Hanseatic city as head of organization. On December 14, 1951, he succeeded Friedrich Dettmann , who had moved to the GDR by a party decision, into the citizenry and became leader of the KPD parliamentary group there. When the KPD failed to pass the newly introduced five percent hurdle in the 1953 mayor election, Hoffmann resigned from the citizenry.

literature

• Christian Sonntag: Media careers. Biographical studies of post-war journalists from Hamburg 1946–1949. Martin Meidenbauer Verlagbuchhandlung, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89975-577-4 , p. 207 ff.
• Hoffmann, 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 .

Web links

• Hoffmann, Erich . In: Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdB - The People's Representation 1946–1972. - [Haack to Huys] (=  KGParl online publications ). Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties e. V., Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020703-7 , pp. 515 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2014070812574 ( kgparl.de [PDF; 507 kB ; accessed on June 19, 2017]).