Fritz Dettner

Fritz Dettner (born November 18, 1905 in Kassel , † August 2, 1937 in Butowo , Soviet Union ) was a German politician of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1931 he became a citizen of the Soviet Union, where he worked as an employee of the Communist International (Comintern), deputy head of the German sector of the International Lenin School and radio journalist. At the time of the Great Terror in 1937, he was a victim of Stalinist purges , sentenced to death and shot.

Life

Dettner, the son of a seamstress and a construction worker , became a worker in a shoe factory after elementary school , which went bankrupt in 1925. Dettner has been politically active since early youth. First he was a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) and became a trade union official. In 1926 he joined the KPD. From 1927 he lived in Berlin . In 1929 Dettner became local editor for a KPD newspaper in Northern Bavaria and was part of the party's Baden-Palatinate district leadership.

On behalf of the party, Dettner traveled to the Soviet Union in July 1931, received Soviet citizenship , became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and from then on called himself Friedrich Friderichowitsch Thies . He studied at the Lenin School until August 1933, where he later became deputy head of the German sector. In the meantime he was also an employee of the Communist International (Comintern).

Then delegated to the party for broadcasting , where he worked, among other things, as a speaker. At the beginning of 1936 he received a party reprimand for “lack of vigilance”. Dettner was sent to Siberia as a radio journalist , where he worked in Novosibirsk and other places. On August 2, 1937, he was arrested by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and sentenced to death on November 1, 1937. Two days later he was shot in Butowo near Moscow . On October 4, 1989, Dettner was posthumously rehabilitated .

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 ).
• Reinhard Müller : The Wehner files. Moscow 1937 to 1941. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1994, ISBN 3-499-19659-X .

Web links

• Fritz Dettner at www.ddr-biografien.de .
• Database of Victims of Political Terror in the USSR / "Детнер Фриц Фридрихович" (Russian)