Erich Markowitsch

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Erich Markowitsch (born April 9, 1913 in Berlin ; † April 9, 1991 ) was a German politician ( KPD / SED ) and economic functionary. He was a member of the GDR Council of Ministers .

Life

1913-1945

Markowitsch, son of a working-class family, attended elementary school and high school in Frankfurt am Main . He worked as a port and warehouse worker. In 1929 he joined the KJVD and in 1930 the KPD and the RGO . From 1932 he was a functionary of the KPD in Hamburg .

Even after the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Markowitsch continued to work illegally for the KPD. He was arrested in April 1933 and later sentenced to six years in prison in Hamburg , which he served in Fuhlsbüttel . After the prison sentence had expired, however, Markowitsch was not released, but was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . From 1942 until the “evacuation” of the camp in January 1945, Markowitsch had to do forced labor in the IG-Farben Buna factory in Auschwitz-Monowitz . He was then imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp , where he was a member of the illegal international camp committee. The Auschwitz survivor David Salz (* 1929), who came to the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp at the age of 13 and pretended to be a 16-year-old electrician, reports that thanks to older inmates, especially thanks to Markowitsch and the tailor Franz Kowalski, he Organizing additional meals and protecting him from the most brutal kapos managed to survive the concentration camp.

1945-1991

After the liberation in 1945, Markowitsch was a co-founder of the Antifa youth in Weimar . In the same year he joined the German People's Police . Markowitsch became head of the Thuringia East Criminal Police Office and later head of a police school. In 1946 he became a member of the SED. He was the manager of the Maxhütte Unterwellenborn and the plant manager of the ore mines West in Badeleben . Between 1950 and 1954 Markowitsch completed a distance learning course at the party college "Karl Marx" .

From 1954 to 1959 Markowitsch was plant director of the VEB ironworks combine "JW Stalin" in Stalinstadt (today: Eisenhüttenstadt). In 1957 he took up a correspondence course in metallurgy at the pig iron college in Unterwellenborn . In 1959 Markowitsch changed to the government of the GDR. From 1959 to 1961 he worked as head of the mining and metallurgy department in the GDR State Planning Commission . From July 1961 to December 1965 Markowitsch was deputy chairman and first deputy chairman of the Economics Council and a member of the GDR Council of Ministers. He was also a member of the Scientific Council for the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy at the GDR Council of Ministers. In 1963 he also took over the board of the SDAG Wismut (until August 1967).

From December 1965 to July 1967, Markowitsch acted as head of the newly established State Office for Vocational Training with the rank of minister. From 1967 to 1969 Markowitsch was again the factory director in the ironworks combine and from 1969 to 1975 finally general director of the state-owned strip steel combine "Hermann Matern" Eisenhüttenstadt.

From 1956 to 1959 Markowitsch was a member of the office of the SED district leadership in Stalinstadt and from 1956 also a member of the National Council of the National Front . From 1958 to 1963 he was a member of the People's Chamber of the GDR and a member of its budget and finance committee. From 1969 he was a member of the Frankfurt (Oder) district leadership of the SED.

From 1975 Markowitsch was chairman of the GDR-Portugal friendship committee, member of the presidium of the League for Friendship of Nations and member of the central management of the committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters .

In June 1981, Markovich called for at the 67th International Labor Conference in Geneva a contribution from the International Labor Organization (ILO) to effectively control the activities of multinational companies in developing countries.

Markowitsch died in 1991 on his 78th birthday. He was buried in the honor grove for those persecuted by the Nazi regime in the Baumschulenweg cemetery in Berlin.

Markowitsch as a witness in the Auschwitz trials

Markowitsch was a witness of the GDR secondary prosecution in the first Auschwitz trial (“criminal case against Mulka and others”, Az. 4 Ks 2/63) in Frankfurt am Main . On February 4, 1965 there was a scandal before the Frankfurt jury court. During his interrogation, Markowitsch had testified, among other things, that Mulka had initiated the selection of unfit forced laborers from Monowitz. One of the defenders in the trial, Hans Laternser , "was not interested in [Markowitsch's] time in the Monowitz camp, but wanted to bring up his supposed role in the construction of the Wall" and discredit the witness. The representative of the co-plaintiffs for the victims living in the GDR, lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul , complained that Laternser's questions to his witness Markowitsch were irrelevant. They had nothing to do with the subject of evidence. The court withdrew to deliberate. Before it could announce its decision, Laternser then even applied - without any evidence - to arrest Markowitsch, as there was an urgent suspicion that "the zone minister had participated in issuing the shooting order against refugees at the Berlin Wall" and thus "To be regarded as a desk perpetrator and murder assistant". Kaul rejected these provocations against the Auschwitz survivors as "fiddles that are supposed to pollute the whole process". The West German secondary complaint also contradicted Laternser's motion, since it “brought unrelated political moments into this negotiation and the questions he posed in no way correspond to the serious background of this process and in no way serve to establish the truth”. The court did not allow Laternser's questions and rejected his application without explanation. Markowitsch also testified as a witness in the second Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1965–1966) and heavily incriminated the SS medical officer Gerhard Neubert .

Trivia

In October 1964, as part of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo , Markowitsch and Minister of Culture Hans Bentzien traveled to Japan with 15 other representatives from science and politics as guests of honor of the NOC of the GDR . For more than three weeks, the delegation visited Japanese universities and industrial companies, among others.

Markowitsch was the patron of the World and European Weightlifting Championships in Berlin in October 1966 and gave the opening address in the Dynamo sports hall .

In 1976 the radio of the GDR produced the radio feature "EM and the happiness of life", which traced Markowitsch's life. It was broadcast on Berlin radio on April 12, 1976 .

Fonts (selection)

  • Investment tasks in industry in 1965. Knowledge and experience for the implementation of the investment ordinance and the project planning ordinance . State Publishing House of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1965.

Awards

literature

  • Handbook of the People's Chamber of the German Democratic Republic. 3rd electoral term . Kongress-Verlag, Berlin 1959, p. 338.
  • Erich Markowitsch , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 17/1978 of April 17, 1978, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Günther Buch: Names and dates of important people in the GDR. 4th, revised and expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin (West) / Bonn 1987, ISBN 3-8012-0121-X , p. 203.
  • Gabriele Baumgartner, Dieter Hebig (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ / DDR. 1945–1990 . Volume 2: Maassen - Zylla . KG Saur, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-598-11177-0 , p. 513.
  • Rainer Karlsch: Uranium for Moscow: The bismuth - a popular story . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-86153-427-4 , pp. 147-151, 153f.
  • Hagen Schwärzel:  Markowitsch, Erich . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): "We hold court day over ourselves ..." History and impact of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 151.
  2. ↑ David Salz on the page of the Wollheim Memorial
  3. ^ Gitta Günther, Lothar Wallraf: History of the City of Weimar . Böhlau, Weimar 1976, p. 648.
  4. ^ New Germany , June 23, 1981.
  5. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): Auschwitz-Prozess 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt am Main . Snoeck, Cologne 2004, p. 757.
  6. ↑ Irmtrud Wojak, Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): "We hold court days over ourselves ..." History and impact of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 252.
  7. ^ Christian Ritz: Representation of the West German secondary prosecution in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and in the Krumey-Hunsche procedural complex (PDF; 426 kB). In: Kritische Justiz 1 (2007), pp. 51–72 (here, p. 62).
  8. ↑ See also: Rudolf Hirsch: Prisoner 70110 . In: ders .: To the final solution: process reports . Dietz, Berlin 2001, p. 153ff. In this article, Hirsch describes how much the dish became the stage of the Cold War.
  9. ^ New Germany , April 6, 1966.
  10. ^ Hans-Christian Herrmann: Japan - a capitalist model for the GDR? In: Deutschland Archiv , Heft 6 (2006), pp. 1032-1042 (here, p. 1033), and Neues Deutschland , October 9, 1964.
  11. ^ ND, October 16, 1966
  12. ↑ Patrick Conley, German Broadcasting Archive: Features and reports on radio in the GDR. Recordings from 1964–1991 . 2nd Edition. Askylt Verlag Berlin 1999, p. 69.
  13. ↑ Neues Deutschland , April 30, 1983, p. 3.
  14. ↑ Neues Deutschland , May 1, 1975, p. 5.
personal data
SURNAME Markowitsch, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD / SED), MdV, member of the GDR Council of Ministers
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 1991