Franz Obermanns

Franz Obermanns (born October 29, 1909 in Elberfeld ; † May 10, 1982 ) was a German communist and resistance fighter .

Life

Obermanns grew up as the son of a waiter. After graduating from elementary school , he trained as a waiter from 1924. In 1925 he became a member of the KJVD . In 1927 he worked in a paper mill and became a member of the factory workers' association . In 1932 he joined the KPD and became a functionary of the RFB in the Lower Rhine district .

In February 1933 he was arrested for his resistance to National Socialism and sentenced by the Reich Court to two and a half years in prison, which he spent in the Emsland camps . After his release from prison, he continued his political activities. When he threatened to be arrested again, he fled to the CSR in December 1935 and from there supported the underground organization of the KPD. In September 1936 he traveled to Spain to support the Republican forces. He fought in the Chapayev Battalion of the 13th International Brigade .

In the summer of 1937 he was delegated to Moscow for intelligence training with the Red Army , which he completed in March 1939. As early as 1938 he was introduced to the GRU agent Sonja , whom he was supposed to support in Switzerland. He was given the identity of a Finnish citizen by the name of Eerke Noki , although he did not speak a word of Finnish and had very little knowledge of Finland . As a result, he was noticed by the Swiss counter-espionage shortly after arriving in the summer of 1939 and he was arrested in December 1939 in the canton of Friborg . For three months, Obermanns refused to give any statement and also to give his real name. Because of his "Reich German" dialect, the Swiss Federal Police made an identity request to the Gestapo , through which he was identified as a former Spain fighter. The Gestapo's extradition request, however, was not granted. Obermanns was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for a passport violation and was subsequently interned until the end of the war.

With Obermann's arrest, his commanding officer Sonja was so endangered that the GRU headquarters decided that she should leave Switzerland and go to Great Britain. This meant that one of the three planned residencies of the GRU in Switzerland was missing, as was a qualified radio operator in the intelligence network of the Red Three .

During his internment, Obermanns got in touch with the KPD emigrant group in Switzerland around Hans Teubner and joined the Free Germany Movement . In August 1945 he was dismissed from the GRU service and he was commissioned to organize the return of the KPD emigrants to Germany together with Gustav Meyer.

People of the "Red Chapel"

→ Main article : People of the "Red Chapel"

literature

• Bernd-Rainer Barth , Werner Schweizer (ed.): The case of Noel Field. - Asylum in Hungary 1954-1957. BasisDruck: Berlin 2007 p. 390
• Alexander S. Blank, Julius Mader: Red band against Hitler. Verlag der Nation: Berlin 1979

Web links

• Files of the UK National Archives (Title: Franz OBERMANNS, alias Eriki NOKI, 'Alex' (German). A Red Army agent, in about September ...)