Ernst Noffke

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Ernst Noffke (born December 11, 1903 in Hamburg , † November 16, 1973 in Berlin ) was a German communist resistance fighter against National Socialism , publishing director, editor and translator.

Life

Noffke was the son of a Hamburg textile worker. He attended a teachers' seminar from 1918 to 1924 and then studied economics at the University of Hamburg from 1925 to 1929 . He worked as a teacher in Hamburg until 1929 and received his doctorate in Berlin in 1932.

In 1921 he became a member of the SPD and in 1923 the KPD , in 1929 he was elected a member of the KPD district leadership in Wasserkante . From 1930 he worked full-time for this KPD district and until April 1931 he was the publishing director of the Hamburger Volkszeitung . Then he was appointed by Ernst Thälmann as teacher and head of the Reichsparteischule of the KPD "Rosa Luxemburg" in Fichtenau near Berlin . At the end of 1932, the KPD's Politburo appointed him to succeed Alexander Emel as head of the Central Committee's agitation and propaganda department . In addition, he took over the information department of the KPD and was thus also responsible for coordinating the M department headed by the KPD Reichstag deputy Hans Kippenberger .

After the Reichstag fire , the KPD was reorganized in order to be able to offer resistance against the Nazi regime . In March and April 1933, Noffke took on the role of Central Committee instructor for the KPD district leaderships in the Ruhr and Middle Rhine regions.

After a brief arrest in mid-May 1933, he lived “illegally” in Berlin until July 15, 1933. He then managed to escape to Moscow via Danzig , the Netherlands , Austria and Czechoslovakia . There he was employed by the publishing cooperative of foreign workers in 1934/35 , where he met Elsa Jandera (1905–1943), whom he married in 1935. After working for the publishing cooperative of foreign workers , he became editor and translator at the publishing house for foreign language literature .

In 1937, because of his friendly contacts with Kippenberger, Noffke was drawn into the maelstrom of Stalinist persecution , which led to his arrest and deportation to a Gulag labor camp . After he was released in 1941 due to the lack of personnel at the KPD headquarters, he initially worked again as an editor and translator. In 1942, the Comintern appointed him a political assistant at Institute 99 . In November 1943, his wife Elsa Noffke was murdered by the SS in the Ravensbrück concentration camp after she parachuted over Germany as a GRU agent and arrested in spring 1943 . In 1944 Ernst Noffke became NKFD representative for the 2nd Belarusian Front and the areas of Germany liberated from it.

After the end of the Second World War , Noffke worked again as an editor at the publishing house for foreign language literature . In January 1952 he returned to Germany and joined the SED . In February 1952 he was appointed head of sector and later head of department at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED . From 1960 he was an editor at the press office of the Council of Ministers of the GDR and in 1965 became a research assistant at the University of Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst .

After the murder of his first wife, Noffke remarried. His daughter Inga Wolfram , who came from this second marriage, made the documentary We Communist Children in 1998 , in which she reconstructed his life from Comintern files, diaries and letters.

In 1968 Ernst Noffke received the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Melvin Spector: World without Civilization: Mass Murder and the Holocaust , Volume 1. University Press of America, 2005, ISBN 0761829636 , p. 384.
  2. ^ Hans Coppi: The "Red Orchestra" in the field of tension between resistance and intelligence work. The Trepper Report of June 1943 . In: "Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte", No. 3/1996, p. 458. (footnote 79)
personal data
SURNAME Noffke, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anti-fascist resistance fighter, publishing director, editor and translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH November 16, 1973
Place of death Berlin