Franz Gold

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Franz Gold (born October 10, 1913 in Botenwald , Austrian Silesia ; † May 8, 1977 ) was a German lieutenant general of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) and for many years head of the main department of personal protection (HA PS) of the MfS.

Patch of the GDR youth organization FDJ / Junge Pioniere with the picture of Franz Gold (officer of the Ministry for State Security)

Life

The son of a blacksmith attended the community school. After training as a butcher , he worked in this profession until 1932. In 1927 he became a member of the Communist Youth Union of Czechoslovakia . From 1932 to 1935 he was a casual worker. In 1932 he became a member of Komunistická strana Československa . In 1933/34 he was arrested several times.

From 1935 to 1937 he served as a soldier in the Czechoslovak Army . He was fired because of political unreliability and worked as a grinder in 1937. In 1938 he became a soldier again.

After the annexation of the Sudetenland , he was arrested by the Gestapo and released after a month. In 1939 he moved to Freiberg and worked in the customs border service and as a butcher.

In 1940 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . In September 1941 - at the time of the greatest successes of the Wehrmacht - he went over to the Red Army as a private . As a Soviet prisoner of war , he attended the Antifa school in Gorky and in 1942 became a soldier in the Red Army. In 1942/43 he worked as a propagandist in German prisoner-of-war camps. In January 1943 he and other German anti-fascists, including Heinz Keßler and Friedrich Augustin , approached Velikiye Luki with loudspeakers and leaflets to the German units trapped there. With Augustin and a group of Soviet soldiers he went into the cauldron to persuade the German commander to surrender. For this commitment, he and Friedrich Augustin were the first German prisoners of war anti-fascists to be honored with Soviet awards for bravery in February 1943.

In 1943 he was a co-founder of the National Committee for Free Germany and Plenipotentiary on the Western and Lithuanian Fronts. He was trained as a partisan and took part in the Slovak uprising in August / September 1944 as commander of a partisan unit. The political commissioner of this unit was Josef Schütz . With the front they reached Moravia and Bohemia.

1945/46 he was Area Secretary of the Communist Party in Fulnek . In 1946 he moved to Dresden , where he became a member of the SED and head of personnel at the Soviet News Office (SNB) in Saxony. From 1948 he worked as director of the German Institute for Socio-Economic Problems, a cover organization of the SNB, in Berlin-Weißensee , where he was German deputy to the head of WA Kolkypin. In 1949 he became personnel director at Berliner Rundfunk in West Berlin .

In February 1950 he was employed at the Ministry of State Security and built up the personal protection department with the rank of inspector (colonel). When the department was upgraded to the main department in 1951, he was appointed chief inspector (major general), but when the new military ranks were introduced in the MfS in 1952, he was downgraded to colonel. In 1959 he was appointed major general and in 1972 promoted to lieutenant general. In January 1974 he was released from the service and retired.

tomb

Gold was buried in the central cemetery in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde in the Pergolenweg grave complex .

Awards

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of January 30, 1980
  2. ↑ Special Memorial Days 2013. Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, accessed on September 1, 2014 .
  3. ^ New Germany from May 15, 1971
personal data
SURNAME Gold, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Lieutenant General (MfS)
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Messenger forest
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1977