Fritz Fränken

Friedrich Wilhelm Fränken , called Fritz Fränken , (born January 15, 1897 in Herrath ; died July 3, 1976 in Rheydt ) was a German KPD politician and resistance fighter against National Socialism . After fleeing Germany, he continued his anti-fascist engagement as an interbrigadist and member of the Resistance .

Life

Fränken was a trained locksmith. In 1920 he joined the KPD. In 1927 he was secretary of his party's sub-district Düsseldorf and leader of the KPD in the Rheydt city council. In 1925 he took over the management of the Krefeld sub-district . From 1931 to 1933, with interruptions by Rudolf Hennig and Rudi Leupold, he headed the Siegen sub-district . In particular, the core area of ​​this work area, the Siegerland , was, unlike the Lower Rhine, an initially German national , then a National Socialist stronghold. Here the left parties were marginalized.

Fränken was elected to the Rhenish provincial parliament in 1925 and was a member of the Prussian parliament from 1928 to 1933 .

In 1924 he was sentenced to three months in prison by the district court of Gladbach-Reydt for violating the peace. On March 8, 1933, Fränken was arrested in Wuppertal and imprisoned in the Sonnenburg concentration camp until December 24, 1933 . While still in custody, he was sentenced to several weeks in prison by the Kirchen (Sieg) district court for misconduct. After his release he returned to Rheydt to work as a locksmith there. In May 1934, after an interrogation by the Gestapo , he went underground. He was now active as "senior advisor" to the Wasserkante district of the KPD. In May 1935 he left Germany via Prague for Moscow . There he belonged to the left wing of the foreign leadership of the KPD. As Fritz Golz he took part as a delegate of Hamburg at the Brussels conference of the KPD , which met in the sense of a party congress (hence: "XIII. Party Congress"), a fundamental change of tactics and strategy in the sense of a united and popular front policy active alliance policy with other left and bourgeois forces, decided.

Fränken was sent to France by his party and belonged to the KPD emigration leadership in Paris. At the beginning of February 1937 he went to Spain to take part in the defense of the democratic republic in the Spanish Civil War. In the same year, his German citizenship was revoked. Fränken worked in the management department of the International Brigades in Albacete and then for the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, the Catalan sister party of the PCE , in Barcelona. Since April 1937 he was also a liaison officer to the 27th division of Karl Marx . In December he was appointed political commissioner to the Hans Beimler Battalion of the XI. International Brigade commanded and seriously wounded during the fighting for Teruel in January 1938. The forearm had to be amputated. Fränken returned to France and worked there as managing director of the friendship group for a democratic Germany. After an arrest and two months in prison, he was again a member of the KPD's emigration leadership from the beginning of 1939. After a second arrest, he was interned in the Roland Garos and Les Milles camps.

During the German occupation he joined the Resistance under the code name Jean Pierre Dussaut and was a member of the National Committee for Free Germany for the West in 1944 ( Comité "Allemagne libre" pour l'Ouest [CALPO]). Together with Heinz Renner (KPD) and the Social Democrats Max Braun and Lisa Kirbach, Fränken was part of the leadership of the circles of friends for a German Popular Front , which arose in the course of the committee's activities to prepare a Popular Front in France .

After the end of National Socialism, he returned to his homeland on the Lower Rhine in 1945. Again he worked for his party in leadership positions. He was first secretary in Mönchengladbach and ran for the KPD in the Rheydt-Mönchengladbach-Viersen constituency. Fränken was a member of the German Peace Society and secretary and on the board of the State Peace Committee of North Rhine-Westphalia , which opposed the remilitarization of the Federal Republic of Germany.

At the end of the 1960s he took an active part in building the DKP .

literature

• Werner Abel / Enrico Hilbert, "You will not get through". Germans on the side of the Spanish Republic and the social revolution, Vol. 1, Lich 2015
• Gottfried Hamacher. With the assistance of André Lohmar: Against Hitler - Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement: short biographies . Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin. Volume 53. ISBN 3-320-02941-X ( PDF )
• Franken, Friedrich . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This and the following information, unless otherwise stated, see: Werner Abel and Enrico Hilbert with the collaboration of Harald Wittstock, Friedrich Villis and Dieter Nelles, "You will not get through". Germans on the side of the Spanish Republic and the social revolution, Lich 2015, p. 152f.
2. ^ To which the districts of Siegen and Altenkirchen as well as adjacent parts of the district of Waldbröl and the Sauerland districts belonged.
3. ^ Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann : Siegerland and Wittgenstein under National Socialism. People, data, literature. A handbook on regional contemporary history (= Siegener contributions, special volume 2001). Siegen 2001, 2nd ed., Pp. 174–177.
   On Fränken in Siegerland: Siegener Zeitung, July 31, 1930, August 5 and 11, 1930, September 15, 1933, especially: Communism in Siegerland, in: Siegener Zeitung, April 5, 1933.
4. ↑ Gottfried Hamacher : Against Hitler. Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement. Short biographies, Berlin 2005, p. 59;
   Bernd-Rainer Barth , Werner Schweizer, Thomas Grimm: The Noel Field case. Key figure in the show trials in Eastern Europe . Berlin 2005, pp. 415, 639;
   Max Schäfer (Ed.): Spain 1936-1939. Memories of interbrigadists from the FRG . Frankfurt (Main) 1976, p. 479;
   André Fontaine: Le camp d'étrangers des Milles. 1939-1943 . Aix-en-Provence 1989, pp. 74, 122, 170;
   Heike Bungert: The National Committee and the West. The reaction of the Western Allies to the NKFD and the Free German Movements 1943–1948 (= Transatlantic Historical Studies, Vol. 8), Stuttgart 1997, p. 139.
5. ^ Karlheinz Pech : On the side of the Resistance. On the struggle of the movement “Free Germany for the West” in France (1943-1945) . Berlin (GDR) 1974, p. 19.
6. ↑ Numerous details, unless otherwise stated, based on: Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst: Deutsche Kommunisten. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 Berlin 2004, pp. 213f.
7. ^ Next to the Siegerland FDP politician Lotte Friese-Korn .
8. ↑ See information from DKP Düsseldorf: [1]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
9. ↑ Friedrich-Martin Balzer (Ed.): Injustice of Justice in the Cold War. The criminalization of the West German peace movement in the Düsseldorf trial in 1959/60 . Cologne 2006, p. 89.
10. ↑ Werner Abel / Enrico Hilbert, "You will not get through". Germans on the side of the Spanish Republic and the social revolution, Vol. 1, Lich 2015, p. 153.