Erich Wollenberg

Erich Wollenberg (born August 15, 1892 in Königsberg ; † November 6, 1973 in Munich ) ( pseudonyms : Walter, Eugen Hardt, Martin Hart) was a leading functionary of the KPD until 1933 , who worked as an independent journalist and publicist in later years .

Life

World War and Revolution

Wollenberg came from a family of doctors and studied medicine in Munich. During the First World War he served as a volunteer. He was decorated with medals, promoted to lieutenant of the reserve (infantry) in 1917 and wounded five times.

In 1918 he joined the USPD and the Spartakusbund . In 1918/19 he took part in the revolution in Königsberg as a leader . He then returned to Munich to continue his medical studies there. In the Bavarian Soviet Republic , Wollenberg was one of the military leaders of the Communist Soviet Republic as commander of the infantry and deputy supreme command of the Bavarian Red Northern Army (Dachau). In 1929 he published the report as a Red Army soldier in Munich about the events . After the Soviet Republic he was to two years imprisonment convicted, he in Landsberg , Ansbach and Niederschönenfeld spent (dismissal in January 1922).

German October and Moscow exile

After his release in March 1922, Wollenberg took on important functions in the KPD. In 1922 he was editor-in-chief of the Red Flag of the East . He also built communist cells in the Reichswehr . In 1920 he was initially head of the armed communist attempted insurrection in the Ruhr area in Bochum, local secretary of the KPD Ruhr area. August 1923 he was military chief south-west (Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, temporarily Bavaria) of the KPD.

After the failure of the German October , the wanted Wollenberg fled to the Soviet Union in 1924 . There Wollenberg was an officer of the Red Army from 1924 to 1926 , battalion commander in Saratow (Volga Germans), then in Moscow. In 1927 he worked illegally in Germany as editor-in-chief of the Arbeiter-Zeitung in Saarbrücken . Back in Moscow he became a research assistant at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute . From 1928 he was at the International Lenin School as a professor for the history of the international labor movement. Erich Honecker was one of his students .

Intra-party conflicts

Due to an amnesty (autumn 1930) Wollenberg was able to return to Germany. After his return in 1931 he became a member of the federal management of the illegal Red Front Fighters Association and editor-in-chief of the magazine Rote Front . He was arrested and then worked as an editor for the Red Flag .

After he appeared as a speaker at a meeting of the NSDAP and was seriously injured by the SA , Wollenberg criticized the KPD leadership, which had not adequately provided for his protection. His criticism was also directed against Walter Ulbricht . Together with Herbert Wehner , he initiated an internal party investigation against Wollenberg, who received a “party reprimand” and lost his post in the editorial office of the Rote Fahne. At the instigation of Wilhelm Pieck , Wollenberg was able to travel to the Soviet Union at the end of 1932. Wollenberg himself later called it “postponed to Moscow”.

Alleged Wollenberg-Hoelz conspiracy

In Moscow he worked on the publication of Lenin's works in German. There he came into the NKVD's field of vision , also because he had contact with the Trotskyist Karl Gröhl . The secret service constructed around Wollenberg and Max Hoelz the accusation of a “counterrevolutionary, Trotskyist terrorist conspiracy” (“Wollenberg-Hoelz conspiracy”). Wollenberg was expelled from the KPD on April 4, 1933 by the International Control Commission of the Comintern .

Persecuted by both Stalin and the National Socialists, Wollenberg managed to escape from Moscow via Prague to Paris in 1934 (1938). In the Soviet Union, Wollenberg was now considered a "Trotskyist" enemy of the state. Many of his acquaintances and political friends were persecuted and murdered.

Exile in Western Europe and Casablanca

In Paris Wollenberg joined the anti-fascist resistance and had contact with intelligence services. After the beginning of the Second World War he was interned as an enemy alien . With the help of French officers, he fled the Le Vernet camp near Paris in May 1940 to Casablanca in Morocco, which later became loyal to Vichy . His extradition to the Gestapo was prevented, even though, despite the support of Walter Fabian and his wife, it was not possible to obtain transit visas for the escape to the USA. His life story in exile is said to have been a basis for the film Casablanca . Although the police arrested Wollenberg in Casablanca in April 1941, there was no extradition to Germany until the Allies landed in November 1942.

Post-war years

After the liberation, Wollenberg first went to Paris in 1946, then to Germany with American support. His main occupation has been a journalist since the 1950s. From 1960 he was head of the foreign policy editorship of the magazine Echo der Woche in Munich , before he left the editorial office after violent conflicts. He was now active as a freelance journalist and publicist and worked with other left-wing critics of Stalinist communism such as Franz Borkenau , Ruth Fischer , Margarete Buber-Neumann and emigrants from Eastern Europe. As an expert and informant about the situation in Eastern Europe, he worked for the Americans, for the eastern offices of the SPD , DGB and FDP and, since the end of 1951, for the Gehlen organization and the Federal Intelligence Service . During the Algerian War, Wollenberg advised Ahmed Ben Bella . Since 1964 he lived in Hamburg. He died on November 6, 1973 in Munich.

He was distantly related to Jörg Wollenberg .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jörg Wollenberg : Le Vernet was her fate, magazine "Sozialismus", issue 5–2016, pages 63–65, Hamburg
2. ↑ Lecture announcement by Jörg Wollenberg ( Memento from December 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 217 kB)
3. ↑ Ronny Heidenreich: The GDR espionage of the BND. From the beginnings to the construction of the Wall (= publications of the Independent Commission of Historians for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 Volume 11). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-96289-024-7 , p. 468.
4. ↑ Jörg Wollenberg: Forgotten Spain fighters, We - senior newspaper, publisher: DGB senior citizens working group, Bremen, No. 27-2016.

literature

• (A. Neuberg), Hans Kippenberger, MN Tuchatschewski, Ho Chi Minh: The armed uprising, attempt at a theoretical presentation, introduced by Erich Wollenberg . Frankfurt am Main, 1971: European publishing company
• Bernd Kramer, Christoph Ludszuweit, ed .: The fire chair and the trackers. Rolf Recknagel, Anna Seghers, Erich Wollenberg on the trail of B. Traven . Karin Kramer Verlag Berlin, 2002 ISBN 3-87956-266-0
• Reinhard Müller : Moscow human trap. Exile and Stalinist Terror. Hamburger Edition 2001 ISBN 3-930908-71-9
• Heinrich August Winkler : The appearance of normality. Workers and the labor movement in the Weimar Republic 1924 to 1930 . Berlin, Bonn, 1985 ISBN 3-8012-0094-9 , p. 881
• Michael Kubina: Of utopia, resistance and the cold war: The untimely life of the Berlin councilor communist Alfred Weiland (1906-1978) . Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2001 p. 379 digitized
• Sven Schneider: Resistance from opposition communists. Erich Wollenberg - persecuted by Hitler and Stalin. In: Hans Coppi , Stefan Heinz (ed.): The forgotten resistance of the workers. Trade unionists, communists, social democrats, Trotskyists, anarchists and forced laborers , Dietz, Berlin, 2012, ISBN 978-3320022648 , pp. 199–228.
• Wollenberg, Erich . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Wollenberg in the catalog of the German National Library
• How Stalin Persecuted German Communists
• Photo by Wollenberg