Franz Pilarski

Franz Pilarski (* 1906 in Miedzno, today a place of Gmina Osie ; † 1985 ) was a German KPD functionary and functionary of the GDR block party DBD . He was a resistance fighter against the Nazi regime and later state chairman of the DBD in Mecklenburg .

Life

Pilarski was born into a family of farm workers. He attended various Polish elementary schools and therefore spoke fluent Polish. His parents were employed as migrant farm workers on various estates in Western Pomerania . Pilarski himself learned the trade of building fitter , later he worked as a traveling sales representative and as a farm and forest worker.

In 1929 he had visited the Soviet Union for nine weeks . In 1931 he was one of the co-founders of the KPD local group in Hanshagen . He was a member of the agricultural workers' association, the Red Aid and the revolutionary trade union opposition . Pilarski was also the secretary of the "Cultural and Educational Association of Polish Workers in Germany" founded in 1925 on the initiative of the KPD.

After the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists, Pilarski took part in the illegal communist resistance. On behalf of the Hanshagen communists, he established the connection to Greifswald to the communists Erich Böhmke, Hermann Lindgreen and Max Weiß and to Wusterhusen to the communists Wilhelm and Rudolf Kühlbach, Ernst Meier and Gottfried Rappke. Because of his work as organizational leader of the KPD Hanshagen and a member of the sub-district leadership of the KPD, Pilarski spent some time in " protective custody " in the Lichtenburg concentration camp in 1933 and 1934 . During the Second World War he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and became a British prisoner of war . He spent this in the Wilton Park camp until 1946 .

After his return to Germany (in the Soviet zone of occupation ) he took on a new farmer's position and joined the SED. From January 1947 to April 1948 he was a member of the SED district leadership in Greifswald as an agricultural policy advisor, from April to June 1948 he was the organizational secretary of the district association of the mutual aid farmers' association .

In 1948, like Ernst Goldenbaum, he was a member of the founding committee of the DBD in Mecklenburg. In the same year he replaced Goldenbaum as state chairman of the DBD in the important start-up center of Mecklenburg. As early as 1949, however, Pilarski was replaced by Ernst-Walter Beer himself as state chairman. Pilarski moved to Berlin in September 1949 as a personnel manager and member of the secretariat for the DBD party executive. In the DBD he held more and more insignificant positions over the years, most recently he was librarian at the DBD party school in Borkheide . As early as 1957 he asked for re-entry into the SED, but the secretariat of the party executive committee of the DBD only agreed to Pilarski's resignation at the urging of the SED in 1959.

In 1959 he became secretary of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship at the University of Greifswald .

literature

• Franciszek Hawranek: Documents and materials on the common struggle of the revolutionary German and Polish workers' movements 1913-1939 . Dietz, Berlin 1977, p. 14.
• Wolfgang Höch, Horst Bendig: The anti-fascist resistance struggle under the leadership of the KPD in Mecklenburg 1933 to 1945 . Dietz, Berlin 1985, p. 151.
• Damian van Melis (ed.): Socialism on the flat country. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 1945 to 1952. Tradition and transformation . Helms, Schwerin 1999, p. 303.
• Theresia Bauer: Block Party and Agrarian Revolution from Above. The Democratic Peasant Party of Germany, 1948–1963. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2003, pp. 87 f., 90, 100, 102, 107, 111, 117–121, 140, 181, 289, 291 and 444.