Erich Gniffke

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Erich Gniffke (1945)
Erich Gniffke at the lectern (1946)
Erich Gniffke (2nd from right) at the unification party congress of the KPD and the SPD to the SED, handshake between Otto Grotewohl and Wilhelm Pieck , 3rd from right: Walter Ulbricht

Erich Walter Gniffke (born February 14, 1895 in Elbing ; † September 4, 1964 in Bad Kissingen ) was a German resistance fighter and politician ( SPD , SED ).

biography

Erich Gniffke was born in West Prussia as the son of a shipyard worker. After attending elementary school , he first worked as an errand boy before successfully completing a commercial apprenticeship from 1909 to 1913. At the age of 18 he became a member of the SPD in 1913. Interrupted by two years of military service in the First World War, he worked at the Komnick works in Elbing until 1920 . For the next four years he was an authorized signatory in a chemicals business. From 1924 to 1926 he was co-owner and managing director of the import and export company “Gniffke u. Co. ".

Although Gniffke was more on the side of the entrepreneurs professionally, he had been an active member of the Central Employees' Association since 1923 . From 1926 he was employed as a full-time functionary in Elbing by the General Free Employees' Association. In 1929 he moved to Braunschweig as a union leader and district manager . He was politically active as a member of the state executive committee of the SPD, in which he worked closely with the then chairman Otto Grotewohl , and in the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold . In this he rose to Gauführer. The Free State of Braunschweig was a stronghold of the NSDAP , where it had already entered government in 1930. Gniffke campaigned vehemently for the defense of democracy. Because he had attacked the government with NSDAP participation, he was convicted in 1932 of breach of the peace . In 1933 he was taken into protective custody and was subsequently unemployed.

From the end of 1933 to 1935 he worked as an auditor for the roofing felt manufacturer cartel. In 1936 he took over general sales for boilers and heating stoves for the company "Heibacko". There he was a leading member of the social democratic resistance against the Nazi regime in the so-called Heibacko group , which served to maintain personal contacts and ensure the economic survival of its members. She could not organize real resistance. He had employed Otto Grotewohl in his office. Together with this he was imprisoned again in the Rennelberg prison in August 1938 . He himself had to spend seven months in solitary confinement and was constantly monitored after his release from prison in his new place of residence in Berlin . Nevertheless, he kept in contact with the social democratic resistance.

Towards the end of the Second World War he was obliged to join the Volkssturm , from which he deserted. Immediately after the liberation from National Socialism in May 1945, he and Grotewohl began to rebuild the SPD in Berlin in the Soviet occupation zone . After the activities had been combined with those of the group around Max Fechner , this succeeded, albeit with difficulty and without the support of the occupying powers. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) had started after the SMAD Order No. 2 to promote the organization of the KPD as a centralist party , which had already been prepared in Moscow . Gniffke played an essential role in building up the SPD because of his organizational talent. When the founding group was constituted as a central committee in June, he became a member there. Under the agreement of the Social Democrats with the KPD of June 19, 1945 and the declaration of the united front as part of the compulsory unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED , his signature was always the first on the part of the SPD.

Within the SPD, Gniffke was more of the organizer, while the more ambitious Grotewohl was the better speaker. Grotewohl also had better relations with Wilhelm Pieck , who with the help of the SMAD tried to "destroy the SPD in a future" unity party ". Kurt Schumacher , chairman of the SPD in the three western occupation zones , had been strictly against one from the start Union of SPD and KPD pronounced. Like the majority in the Eastern Central Committee, Gniffke did not follow this opinion. Gniffke tried to tact with the SMAD and make the SPD the strongest party, which he succeeded towards the end of 1945. When the central committee then formulated the SPD's claim to leadership, the party came under heavy pressure from the KPD and the SMAD. Within the Eastern SPD there were differences between Grotewohl and Gniffke, which were only barely resolved in November 1945. Gniffke was involved in the preparations for Grotewohl's speech at a joint conference of the KPD and SPD in December 1945, at which Grotewohl spoke out against the KPD, without making a speech at the conference.

At the unification party conference on April 19 and 29, 1946, Gniffke was elected as one of 14 members of the SED party executive committee. In the weeks before, many had believed that he would try, like Gustav Dahrendorf or Karl Germer, to keep the SPD from there after fleeing to the West, after he had foreseen in February that the KPD would occupy all key positions in the new party and the SPD would cease to exist. He then probably stayed out of competition with Kurt Schumacher and out of solidarity and responsibility towards the 700,000 SPD members, the majority of whom also had to stay in the Soviet Zone. After the unification, the SPD and Gniffke in particular were quickly pushed back by its former members. During his travels in the Soviet Zone, he quickly noticed a Stalinization of the SED and that social democrats were removed from positions. Since the SMAD did not trust him and Grotewohl pretended to be a communist, Gniffke was quickly isolated within the party and society. In June 1947, against Walter Ulbricht's will, he went to the Prime Minister's Conference in Munich , whereupon Sergei Ivanovich Tjulpanow from SMAD reported to Moscow that Gniffke could not be trusted.

Although he was re-elected to the party executive at the 2nd party congress of the SED in September 1947 , he was further isolated after an opposition speech on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the revolution of 1848 at the latest . Gniffke remained a member of the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and was elected chairman of the secretariat of the German People's Council in March 1948 . This was probably the beginning of his deportation. On September 27, 1948, with reference to his work in the People's Council, he was relieved of all functions by the Central Secretariat, which was expressly welcomed by SMAD. This was the result of his rather hesitant resistance to the transformation of the SED into a new type of party , which mostly only expressed itself in small linguistic subtleties in which, for example, instead of the term new type party, he publicly spoke of the Marxists .

On October 28, 1948, Erich Gniffke wrote his letter of resignation from the SED, in which he mainly attacked Walter Ulbricht. In it he listed all the facts of Stalinization known to him. In the letter he foresaw that the “New Type Party” would lead to the destruction of all democratic rights and a totalitarian dictatorship. He does not want to support this.

After Grotewohl had tried unsuccessfully on the evening of October 29 to persuade Gniffke to remain in the party, he gave a long speech against Gniffke in an extraordinary meeting of the party executive on October 30, in which he criminalized him. Thereupon Gniffke was expelled from the party and investigative proceedings were ordered against his friends and acquaintances.

Erich Gniffke first fled to Frankfurt am Main . There Gustav Dahrendorf helped him to overcome the initial economic hardship. In the west he worked again as a businessman, from 1953 as a self-employed. In 1953 he moved to the Eifel, where he became SPD district chairman in the Daun district in 1959 .

He died of a heart attack in Bad Kissingen in 1964. In 1966 his memoirs were published under the title Years with Ulbricht . In a foreword, Herbert Wehner refers to the predicament in which Erich Gniffke found himself and notes that he did not spare himself.

Works

literature

Web links

Commons : Erich Gniffke  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Hermann Weber : Erich Walter Gniffke In: Karl Wilhelm Fricke (Hrsg.): Opposition and resistance in the GDR. CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-406-47619-8 , pp. 203-209
  2. ^ Dierk Hoffmann: Otto Grotewohl (1894-1964): a political biography , Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009, p. 189.
personal data
SURNAME Gniffke, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gniffke, Erich W .; Gniffke, Erich Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighters and politicians (SPD, SED), MdV
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Elblag
DATE OF DEATH 4th September 1964
Place of death Bad Kissingen