Fritz Loewenthal

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fritz Löwenthal (born September 15, 1888 in Munich , † August 28, 1956 in Valdorf ) was a German politician of the KPD and the SPD .

Life

Löwenthal was born as the son of the Jewish businessman Max Löwenthal and his wife Franziska, geb. Schlesinger, born in Munich. From 1907 he studied psychology and music theory in Berlin and Munich, then economics and finally law. In 1911 he passed the first legal exam, in 1914 the second state examination for the higher judicial and administrative service. In 1913 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the Prussian constitutional dispute from 1862 to 1866.

In 1917 he was called up for military service. After the First World War he worked as a lawyer in Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Berlin. In 1927 he joined the KPD , in 1929 he became chairman of the International Lawyers' Association. In 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag . He was a member of the Executive Committee of Red Aid Germany .

In March 1933, a few days after the Reichstag fire , he emigrated to France. He later went to the Netherlands and in 1935 to the Soviet Union, where he stayed for twelve years. During this time worked as a language teacher, editor and translator in Moscow. He witnessed the Stalinist purges and changed from an admirer to a critic of the Soviet system. From 1943 he was a political instructor in prisoner-of-war camps, including at the Antifa school in the village of Talizy. In 1945, Löwenthal was initially on a supplementary list of initiative groups for use in Berlin, but initially stayed in the Soviet Union.

In 1946 he returned to the Soviet occupation zone after emigrating to Germany . As one of the few fully available communist lawyers, he immediately became the focus of the KPD leadership for an assignment in the German Central Administration for Justice (DJV) under Eugen Schiffer . In January 1946 he was already in discussion as head of Department V of the DJV. It wasn't until January 1947 that Löwenthal was actually hired by the DJV. With his appointment as head of department on February 5, 1947, he was entrusted with the management of department III. By his own admission, Löwenthal had hoped on his return to find a representative of the true interests of the German people in the Socialist Unity Party . On May 25, 1947, however, Löwenthal decided to leave the Soviet Zone. Before that he wrote a farewell letter to Schiffer, in which he wrote that the conditions in the Eastern Zone [...] were almost even worse than in the Soviet Union ; since he does not want to be subservient to any foreign power, there is no other way out than to take the path where the personal freedom of citizens is better respected .

In 1948 his book The New Spirit of Potsdam was published . This book contains material that he provided to the UN Commission to Investigate Forced Labor in the Soviet Union in 1951.

MP

Löwenthal was a member of the fifth Reichstag of the Weimar Republic for the KPD from 1930 to 1932 . From 1948 to 1949 he was a member of the parliamentary council for the SPD . After publicly criticizing Kurt Schumacher for differences in content, he was threatened with expulsion from the party. He anticipated this by resigning from the party and parliamentary group. Since then he has been a non-party member of the parliamentary council and finally spoke out in favor of the adoption of the Basic Law.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Wentker Justice in the Soviet Zone / GDR. R. Oldenbourg Verlag Munich 2001 ISBN 3-486-56544-3 pp. 75-76.
personal data
SURNAME Loewenthal, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD, SPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1956
Place of death Valdorf