Fritz Platten

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Fritz Platten (around 1930)

Fritz Platten (born July 8, 1883 in Tablat SG (today part of the city of St. Gallen ), Switzerland; † April 22, 1942 in Lipowo near Njandoma , Soviet Union ) was a Swiss communist .

Life

Youth and politicization

Fritz Platten was born as the son of the carpenter Peter Platten. In 1892 he came to Zurich , where he completed secondary school and later began an apprenticeship as a locksmith at the Zurich mechanical engineering company Escher Wyss , which he was unable to complete due to an accident.

In 1904, at the age of 21, he joined the Eintracht workers' union . During the time of the Russian Revolution from 1905 to 1907 he emigrated to Russia . In 1906 he took part in an uprising in Riga , Latvia, for which he was sentenced to several months in prison and in 1908 fled to Switzerland. In 1911 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland and in 1912 was a member of the strike leadership of the Zurich general strike .

Together with the Swiss social democrat Karl Manz (1856–1917) and the German SPD politician Richard Fischer , he was responsible for planning and carrying out August Bebel's funeral in Zurich in August 1913 .

Records as a communist

Telegram from Lenin to Henri Guilbeaux dated April 6, 1917, mentioning plates as Lenin's intermediary for the trip through Germany to Russia.

After the collapse of the Second International , Platten joined the Zimmerwald movement and became a communist. He sat as a representative of the Social Democratic Party and later the KPS from 1917 to 1922 in the National Council of Switzerland and then until 1923 in the City Council of Zurich . When the Communist International was founded in Moscow in 1919, he was a member of the Presidium. In 1920 he was serving a prison sentence in Switzerland for participating in the Swiss national strike in 1918 . In 1921 he was one of the founding members of the KPS and acted as its secretary.

Plates was mainly known that after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 , the return of Lenin organized from exile in Switzerland to Russia. During the First World War , Lenin and his company drove through Germany in an allegedly sealed railroad car . On behalf of Lenin, Platten had negotiated with the German ambassador in Bern, Gisbert Freiherr von Romberg . From Sassnitz they reached Sweden by ferry, where they were greeted in Stockholm by the Swedish labor leaders Otto Grimlund , Ture Nerman , Carl Lindhagen and Fredrik Ström . Via northern Sweden they took a train to the Swedish-Russian border, where Platten was held back by the republican government and therefore returned to Switzerland, while Lenin got to Petrograd .

Platten sat with Lenin in the vehicle that was shot at on January 14, 1918 after Lenin's public appearance. He was able to hide Lenin, sustaining a gunshot wound in the hand and thus saving his life.

emigration

In 1923, Platten emigrated to the Soviet Union . Together with Swiss emigrants, he founded an agricultural cooperative near the village of Novaya Lawa in what is now Ulyanovsk Oblast (then Ujesd Syzran ). From 1926, Platten lived in Moscow. After his last trip to Switzerland, he worked as a teacher and research assistant at the International Agricultural Institute from 1931 to 1937.

In 1937 his wife Berta Zimmermann fell victim to the Stalinist purges as a Trotskyist and British, German spy . He himself was arrested in 1938 , convicted as a spy in 1939 and deported to the Lipowo camp near Njandoma. After his sentence of four years in a prison camp (taking into account the one-year detention had served), it was on April 22, 1942 - Lenin's birthday - shot .

Aftermath

On May 15, 1956, Fritz Platten and Berta Zimmermann were rehabilitated as part of the de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union . He was honored many times in the USSR, in particular a street in Njandoma is named after him.

His son, Fritz Nicolaus Platten, opened in Moscow in 1988 on the occasion of a commemoration for the 105th birthday of Plattens, saying that his father wrote in a letter that he should be shot because his imprisonment in the camp had ended. Until then, heart disease was given as the official cause of death .

Private

During his stay in Riga during the first Russian Revolution, Platten met the Jew Lina Chait, who became his partner. She took part in a revolutionary circle and thus prepared for battle. When Platten was imprisoned in Riga in 1906, he was released on bail . Lina Chait provided the money. She gave her dowry . Lina Chait followed Platten to Zurich. Together they had a son, Georg Platten, who was born in 1909. In 1924 Georg Platten followed his father and emigrated to Russia.

Plattens first wife was the Russian Olga Nikolajewna Korslinski. The marriage resulted in the son Fritz Nicolaus Platten (* December 17, 1918, † September 4, 2004). He grew up in the Willi Trostels family because his mother committed suicide on December 31, 1918 in Zurich . Plattens second wife was the Lithuanian Lisa Rosowsky. His third wife, the Zurich communist Berta Zimmermann, who went to the Soviet Union with him, was arrested in Moscow in 1937 and shot in the same year.

Fonts

Fritz Platten: Lenin's Journey through Germany in a Sealed Car (1924)
  • Lenin's journey through Germany in a sealed car. New German publishing house, Berlin 1924.
  • as editor: Finland: The Revolution and White Terror. Promachos, Bern 1918.

literature

documentary

  • The red Fritz - searching for traces in revolutionary times. Documentary, Switzerland, 2014, 50:30 min., Script and direction: Helen Stehli Pfister, moderation: Kathrin Winzenried, camera: Laurent Stoop, production: SRF , first broadcast: May 1, 2014 on SRF 1 , table of contents, video and photo gallery by SRF, ( Youtube ).

Web links

Commons : Fritz Platten  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ursula Herrmann: August Bebel. A biography. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1989, p. 738 and p. 754, ISBN 3-320-01474-9 .
  2. ↑ Ursula Herrmann: August Bebel. A biography. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1989, p. 740.
  3. ↑ Werner Hahlweg (ed.): Lenin's return to Russia 1917: The German files . Brill, Leiden 1957, pp. 24, 103
  4. ↑ Dmitri Volkogonov : Lenin: A New Biography. Free Press, New York 1994, ISBN 978-0-02-933435-5 , p. 229. ( Excerpts from Google Books .)
  5. ↑ Kevin McDermott, Jeremy Agnew: The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. Macmillan, Basingstoke 1996, ISBN 978-0-333-55284-1 , p. 146.
  6. ^ Fritz Nicolaus Platten: Memento from: Glasnost for Fritz Platten (1883-1942) . (PDF; 72 kB) In: Horch and Guck , 1994, Issue 11, pp. 35–42, accessed on May 3, 2014.
  7. ↑ Не надо было заслонять вождя. ( Memento of the original from October 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: hronograf.narod.ru , January 20, 2003, accessed May 3, 2014.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / hronograf.narod.ru
  8. ↑ Alexander Dunajewski: Platten is known. Military Publishing House of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1978, p. 63.
  9. ^ Information from the Archives for Contemporary History , Zurich, on Fritz Nicolaus plates.
  10. ↑ Bedbugs and fleas . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 1994 ( online review). Quote: "Documents from Moscow clarify the fate of Confederates in the service of the Comintern - and still frighten the communists today."
  11. ↑ Urs Hafner: Lenin's Swiss Helpers . In: NZZ , April 29, 2014: “Like in an insane sect”.
personal data
SURNAME Platten, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss communist
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Tablat SG
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 1942
Place of death Lipovo, Nyandoma Raion, Arkhangelsk Oblast