Friedrich Giessner

Friedrich Giessner (born August 18, 1898 in Gera ; † May 31, 1976 in Ilfeld ) was a communist politician and resistance fighter .

Life

Friedrich Giessner's parents were weavers and volunteered for the SPD . He learned a lathe operator himself and joined the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV) in 1915 . In the workers' youth movement he was on the left wing, which was based on Karl Liebknecht . In 1915 in Gera and 1916 in Berlin, he helped to bring together the Free Socialist Youth (FSJ). As an anti-militarist , he took part in anti-war campaigns and illegal meetings. He distributed Liebknecht's writings, especially his appeal against war, The Commandment of the Hour . He had to become a soldier in January 1917 and was seriously wounded on the front in 1918. When he returned from the military, he joined the Spartakusbund in November 1918 and became a co-founder of the KPD in Gera in January 1919 . From 1925 to 1932 he was a member of the city council.

He rejects the policy of Stalinization of the KPD, which began in 1928 , "because it could not lead to the balance of power that withstood the onslaught of reaction and fascism," as he wrote in his résumé in 1945. He stood against the social fascism thesis and against the course of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). Friedrich Giessner joined the Communist Party opposition (KPD-O). From 1929 he was head of this party in Gera. In the illegal resistance Giessner achieved the cooperation between social democrats and communists in the sense of a united front . As one of the leaders, he was arrested in May 1934 and sentenced to three years in prison by the Jena Higher Regional Court in October. He was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp . From there he was released in April 1940, and in 1944 he was imprisoned again in this concentration camp. He resumed illegal work and was able to maintain the united front of the socialists in his sphere of activity. They are working towards the surrender of the city of Gera to the US Army without a fight, so that the city could be surrendered undamaged on April 14, 1945.

Giessner became chairman of the city's anti-fascist committee and soon became mayor. For a time he was political leader of the KPD and in 1946 was a member of the district executive committee of the SED. But his KPD-O past, of which he remained proud, led to a reprimand in a party proceeding before the Central Party Control Commission . Although his development work in Gera was found to be good, he was transferred to Nordhausen in August 1949 . He only worked there as district administrator , but was quickly removed. During this period almost all experienced KPD-O members were removed from their positions after he had said and written that he and other experienced communists should be able to talk to the Soviet occupation about their mistakes. From 1951 to 1955 he headed the district adult education center, after which he was deputy head of the cultural office of the city of Erfurt . With Khrushchev's policy of de-Stalinization , there was a half-hearted rehabilitation, so he was mayor of Nordhausen from 1957 to 1963.

As a pensioner, he received various honors, awards and medals. The honorary citizenship of the city of Nordhausen , granted in 1973, was revoked in 1990.

literature

• VdN act in the HstA Thuringia: Life and Struggle of Comrade Fritz Giessner Nordhausen, 1979
• Theodor Bergmann : Against the current. The history of the KPD (opposition) . Hamburg, 2004. (A short biography about Fritz Giessner can be found on pages 447/448 of this book.)
• Steffen Kachel : A red-red special path? Social Democrats and Communists in Thuringia 1919 to 1949 , = publications of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, Small Series Volume 29, p. 550

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Giessner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Fritz Giessner - NordhausenWiki