Felix Wolf (party official)
Felix Wolf (actually Werner Waldemar Richard Rakow ; born August 30, 1893 in Adsel-Koiküll, Livonia Governorate , today: Koikküla , Valga district ; † September 14, 1936 in Moscow ) was a German-Russian communist.
Wolf spent his early childhood in the Russian Empire as the second son of the German forester Gotthold Rakow and his wife Emma. The family returned to Germany in 1900. In 1914 he moved to Saint Petersburg after completing an apprenticeship in banking . When war broke out, he was interned as a civilian prisoner in Russia. In 1917 Wolf founded a political group among prisoners and joined the Bolsheviks in the same year . He was involved in fighting in the Red Army and in 1919 co-founded the KPD .
From May 1919 to November, Wolf worked as the KPD district secretary in Hamburg. He played a leading role in the March campaign in Hamburg. As an employee of the Comintern apparatus, he was often in Germany, but also in Vienna and the Balkans . In 1923 he headed the KPD's illegal news apparatus when it wanted to provoke a “ German October ”. After the failure of the Hamburg uprising , the ultra-left party leadership of the KPD removed him from his offices. Wolf had to meet in Moscow. There he met several times in 1924 with Karl Radek as well as with August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler - both leading representatives of the “party rights”.
In 1925 Wolf went to the United States and began studying at Columbia University . At the same time he coordinated secret actions of the Soviet "services" in the United States together with others on the spot.
In 1927 he received an order to return to Moscow. There he was close to the Left Opposition . In 1928 he was arrested for the first time in the Soviet Union and expelled from the CPSU , but in June 1929, after a declaration of repentance, he was re-accepted into the Communist Party together with the "Gruppe der 38". In April 1933 he was again expelled from the CPSU for "factional activity". He then worked in the Kuznetsk Basin coalfield in western Siberia . A decision by the IKK led to re-entry into the party in July 1934 - possibly because it had uncovered alleged activities of "fascists", "Trotskyists" and "vermin" in the coal mine. Since November 1934, Wolf was again in Moscow.
On July 27, 1936 he was arrested in the course of the Great Terror for alleged membership in a counter-revolutionary organization (" Wollenberg - Hoelz Conspiracy"). On September 14, 1936, the Supreme Soviet's Military College sentenced him to death in a 15-minute session; the sentence was carried out on the same day.
Wolf's brothers Nikolai and Paul Rakow were also communist revolutionaries. Paul Rakow was expelled from the CPSU in March 1937, arrested in the Soviet Union in April and shot on December 20, 1937.
literature
- Reinhard Müller : Moscow human trap. Exile and Stalinist Persecution . Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-930908-71-9 , there in particular pages 80–84 and 336–343.
- Markus Wehner : Cadre of the World Revolution: The German-Russian History of the Rakow Brothers. ( International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement (IWK); 1994, 1, pp. 29-67)
- Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online [accessed October 15, 2011]).
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c d Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst: German Communists
- ^ Jürgen Zarusky : Stalin and the Germans: new contributions to research , Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006, p. 52.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wolf, Felix |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wolff, Felix; Wolf, Karl Felix; Rakow, Werner Waldemar Richard; Inkov, Vladimir |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-Russian communist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 30, 1893 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Adsel-Koiküll, Livonia Governorate |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 14, 1936 |
| Place of death | Moscow |