Fritz Charpentier

Fritz Charpentier (born December 22, 1869 in Norden , East Friesland, † August 2, 1928 in Moscow ) was a German politician of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). From 1921 to 1924 he was a member of the Prussian state parliament .

Life

After completing a commercial school in a private educational establishment and training, Charpentier became a businessman and traveler in the Rhineland and the Ruhr area . Before the outbreak of the First World War he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). As an opponent of the war, Charpentier left the party in 1917 and became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) from 1919 as party secretary in Solingen .

In 1920 Charpentier, who had participated as a delegate at the so-called splitting party convention of the USPD, became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and became secretary of the Solingen subdistrict. For the KPD, Charpentier was elected to the Prussian state parliament in 1921, to which he belonged until 1924.

Within the KPD parliamentary group at the time, there were strong disputes over the political course. The faction split for a time. As a representative of a moderate course, Charpentier was part of the communist working group in the Prussian state parliament, led by Paul Levi . Charpentier remained a member of the KPD, returned to the parliamentary group and became party secretary in Elberfeld . At the beginning of 1924 he also became editor-in-chief of the Remscheider Bergische Volksstimme daily newspaper , but was relieved of this post in July 1924 after left forces in the KPD took over leadership. Charpentier was not nominated again for a mandate in the state parliament.

Because of preparations for the uprising in 1923, Charpentier was wanted by the police from 1924 and emigrated to the Soviet Union . There he is said to have been the victim of Stalinist purges , as reported in 1928 in social democratic newspapers. The communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne contradicted this , claiming that Charpentier had been ill for a long time and died on August 2, 1928 in a Moscow hospital.

literature

• 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 ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Federal Archives , KPD - Confrontations with oppositional and anti-party forces and groups in the party ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Koblenz, accessed 2014.  
2. ^ Pierre Broué , The German Revolution, 1917–1923 , Haymarket Books, 2006.