Erwin Jöris

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Erwin Jöris (born October 5, 1912 in Lichtenberg , Niederbarnim district ; † November 17, 2013 in Cologne ) was a German resistance fighter during the Nazi era and a victim of the Stalinist terror .

Erwin Jöris (2012)

Childhood and youth

Erwin Jöris was born in 1912 in a working-class district in the city of Lichtenberg on the eastern edge of Berlin . His father, a coal merchant, took part in the Spartacus battles in 1918. After school, where Werner Seelenbinder was one of his classmates, Jöris completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter. At the age of 16 he joined the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) in 1928 .

Resistance to National Socialism

In 1931 Jöris was "Sub-District Leader East" of the KJVD in Berlin. In 1932 he protested against the KPD's support for a referendum initiated by the National Socialists to dissolve the Prussian state parliament . At the risk of his life he distributed leaflets with the inscription: "Hitler - that means war".

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists Jöris was arrested in March 1933, inmates in custody were Erich difficulty , Sperber and Hermann Duncker . After he was sentenced to protective custody , he was transferred to the Sonnenburg concentration camp, where Jöris met Ludwig Renn and Carl von Ossietzky . He was dismissed in March 1934 against the promise to never again “act in a manner hostile to the state”.

Soviet exile

Two months after his release, he emigrated to the Soviet Union on behalf of the now illegal KPD . There he lived in Moscow in the Hotel Lux and attended Comintern training courses . In view of Stalinist show trials , he gradually distanced himself from the Stalinist communist worldview. After freely expressed criticism, he was sent by the Youth International in January 1935 to an industrial company in Sverdlovsk on probation . Nevertheless, his career as a functionary was as good as over: With reference to his "promise" when he was released from the concentration camp, Herbert Wehner and others accused him of not having offered enough resistance to the National Socialists.

Communist persecution and imprisonment

When he refused to give a whitewashed lecture at the Comintern School about the allegedly strong communist resistance in Germany in August 1937, the NKVD arrested him and took him to Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison on charges of being a Trotskyist spy .

The Soviet Union pushed Jöris in April 1938 to the German Reich from. She handed him over to the Gestapo , which imprisoned him again until February 1939. In March 1940 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . From 1941 Jöris was deployed on the Eastern Front. Shortly before the war, he got into the Battle of Berlin in Soviet captivity . There he withheld his knowledge of the country and language. So he was released in September 1945.

Jöris returned to East Berlin , where the Soviet secret police arrested him again on December 19, 1949. The arrest was preceded by a denunciation by comrades from the time of his exile in Moscow. After a year of pre-trial detention in the “submarine” in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to 25 years of forced labor in 1950 . Before the verdict was pronounced, the examining magistrate threatened Jöris: "Your snout will freeze over in Siberia," to which he replied: "Your snout too".

Grave site at the Holweide cemetery in Cologne (2016)

Jöris served his imprisonment as a political prisoner in the RetschLag / Vorkuta labor camp (from 1948 to 1954, the special camp of MWD No. 6, the RetschLag (river camp), belonged to the Vorkuta camp complex). As part of the return of tens of thousands , he was released in 1955 to East Berlin. From there he fled directly with his wife to Cologne , where he lived until his death. Only in 1995 did his rehabilitation by Russian authorities take place. In 2002 Jöris was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon .

The Swiss film Erwin Jöris - Between Hitler and Stalin , published in 2002, and his autobiography "My life as a persecuted man under Stalin and Hitler" , published in 2004, report on his fate . On the 100th birthday of Erwin Jöris, the Cologne-born Swiss historian Andreas Petersen published a comprehensive biography. It is based on 26 in-depth interviews with Jöris and research in Berlin, Moscow and Sverdlovsk archives. In 2013, based on this text, the life of Erwin Jöris was staged in three productions in the Berlin Theater 89.

Jöris was buried on December 9, 2013 in the Cologne-Holweide cemetery (hall 1 no. U292).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary by VEREINIGUNG JUNE 17, 1953 eV of November 24, 2013 (accessed on November 28, 2013).
  2. ↑ Short biography on zeitzeugen.ch ( Memento from January 20, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Andreas Petersen : Street fighters on the edge. Berlin civil war youth 1932 . In: Berlin in the past and present. Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives 2009 . Gebr. Mann, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-7861-2602-7 , pp. 279-310, passim; Petersen relied on interviews with Jöris, among other things
  4. ↑ Uli Kreikebaum: Erwin Jöris: A Life for Resistance , Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, October 3, 2012
  5. ↑ Erwin Jöris , biography in Memorial.de, online at: gulag.memorial.de / ...
personal data
SURNAME Jöris, Erwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter against National Socialism and victim of Stalinist persecution
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Lichtenberg , Niederbarnim district
DATE OF DEATH 17th November 2013
Place of death Cologne