Erich Klann (communist)

Tombstone

Erich Klann (born January 16, 1896 in Zerrehne , district of Köslin , † December 6, 1948 in Lübeck ) was a German politician of the KPD .

Life

The trained locksmith Klann was a founding member of the KPD. At the beginning of the 1920s he headed the municipal political department of the Mecklenburg-Lübeck district management and was organ director of the Wasserkante district management from the end of 1928 to 1932. He was a co-founder of the international workers' aid in Lübeck. From 1921 to 1933 Klann was parliamentary group leader of the Communist Party of Germany in the Lübeck citizenship , one of the smaller of the German state parliaments .

After the township election on February 10, 1924, the newly elected township elected its new presidium on March 3, 1924 . Gustav Ehlers ( SPD ) was elected spokesman for the citizenry with all votes , with the exception of the communists. Carl Heinsohn ( DVP ) was then elected first deputy with 65 out of 77 votes. In the election for the second deputy of the spokesman , Johannes Hefti (New Owner Association) won the majority with 44 out of 79 votes. Now Egon Nickel took the floor as leader of the Communist faction. He criticized the fact that the citizens had conspired against them and not their favorite Erich Klann, who only received the 10 votes of his party, as a representative of the third largest parliamentary group in the citizenry, would have chosen the third deputy in the presidium . As a consequence, Nickel had to express its distrust of the citizens for his party .

In 1933 he was secretary of the illegal KPD in Greater Hamburg . He was arrested on April 29, 1933 and sentenced on October 23, 1934 to two years in prison. He was then placed in " protective custody " until December 23, 1938 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . After his release he worked as a locksmith, was arrested again on August 23, 1939 and was again in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until April 1945. After 1945 he became head of the employment office and city president in Lübeck . He died as a result of imprisonment.

Plaque

The grave of him and Maria, his second wife, is in the Vorwerker cemetery in the inner courtyard of the memorial to the victims of war and tyranny . The memorial plaque for the victims of National Socialism at the town hall in Lübeck also bears his name. In the St. Jürgen district, a stumbling block in front of his apartment at Neuengammer Straße 1 has been a reminder of his fate since 2011.

Maria

The daughter of the miner Burbaum, born as Maria Johanna, attended the commercial school in Wanne-Eickel , did a commercial apprenticeship and then worked as an office clerk and typist . During the Kapp Putsch she was a paramedic and first joined the USPD and the KPD at the end of the year. Here she first worked in the secretariat of the KJD in Bochum and later as sub-district manager of the Communist Youth Association in Essen. In 1926 she married the Bochum KPD and RFB functionary Erich Krollmann (+ 1937). As an instructor from the Agitprop department of the Wasserkante district management, she had been in both Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein since the end of 1928 and was elected as a member of the Hamburg parliament in 1929 .

From January 1933 to February 1934 she took courses at the International Lenin School in Moscow . Under the code name "Hertha" she returned to Germany via Prague in 1934 to work now illegal. As an instructor and sub-district manager, she was first in Leipzig , then as a senior advisor for the guidance of illegal district leaders in Stuttgart , Frankfurt am Main and Mannheim . She was arrested in Mannheim in January 1935 and transferred to Leipzig. The 1st Senate of the People's Court sentenced her to 15 years in Jauer prison on October 4, 1935 . Here she was liberated and returned to Lübeck in 1945, meanwhile married to Erich Klann.

At the end of the 1940s she was one of the top officials in Schleswig-Holstein. The star named her in 1949, referring to the Romanian Foreign Minister “ Ana Pauker of the North”. Her criticism of the total subordination of the West German KPD to the SED, expressed in the early fifties, resulted in her being expelled in August 1952 for “behavior that was harmful to the party” and was vilified as a “ Titoist and American agent”. Even the Lübeck VVN, whose chair she held for a long time, dismissed her. Her application for membership in the SPD was rejected in 1954, but was granted two years later. Until 1958, however, the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution had warned against it. Since 1973 she was the honorary chairwoman of the workers' welfare in Lübeck.

Minna

Plaque

In his first marriage, Klann was married to Minna Koll. After taking power, she headed the now illegal KPD in Lübeck. For example, she fetched illegal documents from ships calling at the port. She printed other resistance groups and printed leaflets. After her husband was arrested in 1934, she was arrested in October 1935. In the so-called Lübeck Communist Trial , she and Ernst Puchmüller were convicted of high treason by the People's Court on December 15, 1936 . She died on April 18, 1940 while she was serving her eight-year sentence in Lauerhof prison . Her grave is also in the courtyard of the memorial for the victims of war and tyranny in the Vorwerk cemetery.

Web links

Commons : Erich Klann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Federal foundation to come to terms with the SED dictatorship

literature

• Alexander Gajewski: Erich Klann (1896-1948). In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Biographical Handbook, Volume 4 (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 6). Metropol, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-148-3 , pp. 493-499.
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (Ed.): Handbook of the German Communists , Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 . ( Online )

Individual evidence

1. ^ First meeting of the new citizenship. In: Lübeckische advertisements , Volume 174, No. 54, edition of March 4, 1924.