Fritz Schulte (politician)

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Fritz Schulte (born July 28, 1890 in Hüsten , † probably May 10, 1943 in the Soviet Union ; code name: Fritz Schweizer) was a German politician ( KPD ).

Life

Early years and Weimar Republic (1890 to 1933)

Schulte was born in 1890 as the son of a factory worker. He attended elementary school and then worked in a chemical factory.

After the First World War , Schulte became a works council at the Leverkusen paintworks . In 1920 Schulte became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In the following years he took on numerous functionaries for the party. In 1921 Schulte was expelled from the Factory Workers' Association (FAV), which he had advocated splitting. A year later he was appointed trade union secretary in the KPD. From 1928/29 Schulte belonged to the Reich Committee of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). From July 1932 to 1933 he was officially Reichsleiter of the RGO. He replaced Franz Dahlem in this role.

As a Polleiter, Schulte had the reputation of being one of the most aggressive advocates of communist doctrine, which is why he was given the nickname Noske vom Niederrhein . This alluded to the SPD politician and former Reichswehr Minister Gustav Noske , who was considered extremely brutal by many contemporaries and was considered a "bloodhound" because of his role during the November Revolution of 1918. In 1927 Schulte was elected to the central committee of his party, in 1929 he also became a member of the Politburo . Alongside Hermann Schubert and Leo Flieg, he was considered the closest friend of KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann in the party's leadership.

From 1928 Schulte was a member of the Prussian Landtag for his party , to which he belonged until 1930. In September 1930 Schulte was elected to the Reichstag as a candidate of the KPD for constituency 22 ( Düsseldorf East) . In July 1932 he was re-elected as a candidate for constituency 23 (Düsseldorf-West) and was re-elected in November 1932 as a member of this constituency. After that, Schulte was nominally a member of the Reichstag until March 1933.

National Socialism and Exile in Paris (1933 to 1935)

After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Schulte, as a top communist functionary and due to his exposed position as a KPD member of the Reichstag, was persecuted by the National Socialists . He was able to avoid arrest by going underground. In the course of the reorganization of the KPD after its defeat by the National Socialists, Schulte, together with Walter Ulbricht , John Schehr and Hermann Schubert, formed the core of the so-called domestic leadership of the KPD, which was now operating underground in the German Reich , while other functionaries set up a leadership in exile in safe countries in Paris (International line). The four named were the only members of the Politburo of the KPD who remained in Berlin .

After several months of underground work, Schulte was recalled to Paris like the other three for security reasons in autumn 1933 . He stayed there until the beginning of 1935. Even when it was later illegally, Schulte temporarily took over the management of the RGO between 1933 and 1935. After 1935 Schulte went with the rest of the Politburo to Moscow , the new seat of the KPD leadership. Schulte himself reached the Soviet capital after a long stay in Prague . Schulte's wife Emmi Schweitzer and their son were taken into “ protective custody ” in Germany .

Exile and captivity in the Soviet Union (1935 to 1943)

In the meantime, at the Brussels Conference of the KPD in 1935, a radical change of course took place in the party's political orientation: The Thälmann Line of the Weimar years - which propagated the struggle against social democracy and the republic - was abandoned. Instead, they now distanced themselves from this line. Instead of Thälmann, who was considered a “martyr” since his imprisonment by the National Socialists and who was forbidden to criticize, Schulte, Hermann Schubert, Heinz Neumann and Hermann Remmele in particular were blamed for the failed policy . As a result, all four were expelled from the KPD Central Committee. The leadership of the party was now essentially taken over by Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck . The Thälmann biographer Monteath evaluates the elimination of the group of four from the leadership of the party as the last act in the disempowerment of the imprisoned Thälmann, who would have stood there weakened after a release from prison (which was then considered possible): “With the disempowerment and subsequent murder of his followers in However, after the Soviet Union, Thälmann lost his power in the party leadership and his successors in the Politburo were evidently more interested in the Thälmann symbol for their propaganda campaign than in the people and competitors. "

Schulte worked in a large Moscow company in the following years. The persecution of Schultes by the new KPD leadership and the Soviet state apparatus was planned by 1937 at the latest. The informants who reported on Schulte during this time included the later SPD politician Herbert Wehner , who was then living as a communist in Moscow and who in December 1937 reported to the Soviet secret service NKVD about Schulte and his ominous "connections". As a leader of the "sectarian" opposition within the KPD and as head of the Anti-Comintern bloc, Schulte was arrested on February 21, 1938 in the course of the Stalin Purges (Chistka) in Moscow. An indictment that has survived is dated March 2, 1939. On April 7, 1941, he was sentenced to eight years in a Gulag camp. To serve the same, he was taken to the Sevpetsch camp, where he had to do “reform work”. In 1943 he died in the camp, with a probability bordering on certainty from the harsh working and living conditions.

In the historiography of the GDR , Schulte, in accordance with the party line of the KPD / SED, was usually assigned the role of a scapegoat for the failure of the KPD in the confrontation with National Socialism in the late phase of the Weimar period: Um Thälmann, who as KPD - Chairman of the party line had determined to be able to celebrate as a communist martyr, Schulte was assigned the actual responsibility for the tactical errors of the party line. For example, in Horst Bednareck's account of the KPD's trade union policy during the Weimar period from 1969: “[So] Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte enforced their narrow policies that hindered the KPD's mass policies [...] They negated the Walter Ulbricht's resistance to such a hideous policy. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ date and place of birth according to the Reichstag Handbuch; Date of death according to: Michael Buckmiller / Klaus Menschkat: Biographical Handbook for the History of the Communist International , 2007, p. 159. Buckmiller and Menschkat refer to files of the NKVD to note the date of death. The year of death 1943 is generally considered correct in research; It is plausible that the date of death noted in the files on May 10th exactly applies - with a view to the mass deaths in the Soviet camp system, the war time, the inhuman Stalinist bureaucracy in the camps themselves and in the administrative offices in Moscow, however, a postponement of one can certainly also be the case a few days or even weeks.
  2. ↑ Cf. on the activity in the RGO Stefan Heinz : Moscow's mercenaries? The “Unified Association of Metal Workers in Berlin”: Development and failure of a communist union . Hamburg 2010, pp. 216, 230, 277, 282, 307, 325, 338, 340, 457.
  3. ↑ Communist Party of Germany: Against the Stream , 1928, p. 234. During the Weimar period, Noske had a general reputation for having the revolution shot down.
  4. ↑ Peter Monteath: Ernst Thalmann. Mensch und Mythos , 2000, pp. 22 and 83.
  5. ↑ Michael Buckmiller / Klaus Menschkat: Biographical Handbook on the History of the Communist International , 2007, p. 159.
  6. ^ Jürgen Zarusky : Stalin and the Germans. New contributions to research , 2006, p. 53.
  7. ↑ Michael Buckmiller / Klaus Menschkat: Biographical Handbook on the History of the Communist International , 2007, p. 159.
  8. ^ Horst Bednareck: The trade union policy of the Communist Party of Germany. 1969, p. 62.
personal data
SURNAME Schulte, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Swiss, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Cough
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: May 10, 1943
Place of death Soviet Union