Fritz Wolffheim

Fritz Wolffheim , actually Friedrich Wilhelm Wolffheim (born October 30, 1888 in Berlin , † March 17, 1942 in Ravensbrück ), was a national communist politician , author and trade unionist .

Life

The son of the wealthy Jewish businessman George Wolffheim trained as a clerk (accountant) and was a member of the SPD from 1909 , where he worked for various party newspapers.

From 1910 to 1913 he stayed in San Francisco, was a member of the Socialist Party of America and edited the Forward of the Pacific Coast - a publication of the unionist union federation Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded in Chicago on June 27, 1905 , of which Wolffheim was a member. In 1913 Wolffheim settled in Hamburg, where from the beginning of the war in 1914, the opponents of the SPD's " Burgfriedenspolitik " began to group around him and Heinrich Laufenberg . Closely based on the International Communists of Germany , the two published the newspaper Der Kampf and were imprisoned several times between 1915 and 1918 for anti-war activities . In 1918 Wolffheim was initially one of the leaders of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in Hamburg, but had to go to a sanatorium from mid-November 1918 to May 1919 because of a nervous problem.

In 1919 Wolffheim joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), where he was one of the most important spokesmen for the anti-parliamentary left wing alongside Laufenberg and Otto Rühle . In October 1919 he and Laufenberg were expelled from the KPD on charges of syndicalism . Laufenberg and Wolffheim actually represented a unionism that considered the parallel existence of an economic fighting organization as a mass basis and a predominantly theoretical and propagandistic party to be necessary. This concept was consensus within the council communist movement until around 1922, but was then abandoned by the majority in favor of a unified organization. In 1922 Wolffheim moved to Brieselang and married his wife Louise Wegner there in 1923.

Wolffheim and Laufenberg founded the “Communist Party Hamburg / Section of the IWW” (KPH / IWW) after being expelled from the KPD and was also instrumental in founding the AAU . In April 1920 the KPH became part of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), in which he and Laufenberg belonged to the so-called national Bolshevik wing and were asked to leave the party a few months later in August due to bourgeois nationalist views under the leadership of Arthur Goldstein . The basis of this dispute was, among other things, the founding of the "Free Association for the Study of German Communism", in which Wolffheim and Laufenberg tried to convey to middle-class middle-class companies, under the impression of the Peace Treaty of Versailles, a common interest in aligning Germany with Soviet Russia . Wolffheim headed the "Bund der Kommunisten" (Association of Communists), founded by both of them after they left the KAPD, but this sank into sectarianism shortly after it was founded. After separating from Laufenberg in 1922, Wolffheim had tried several times between 1925 and 1929 to re-join the KPD, which, under the impression of the "Schlageter speech" by Karl Radek , who had previously fought Wolffheim and Laufenberg vigorously, and the Having coined the term “national Bolshevism”, began to briefly adopt clearly “national Bolshevik” theses. In contrast to Laufenberg, Wolffheim developed further and further away from Marxism and towards ethnic- socialist ideas and in 1930 joined the Social Revolutionary Nationalists (GSRN) group around Karl Otto Paetel .

Stumbling block for Fritz Wolffheim in Hamburg-Wandsbek

Wolffheim was arrested at the end of 1936 and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942 .

literature

• Wolffheim, Fritz . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945. 2., revised. and strong exp. Edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

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

• Literature by and about Fritz Wolffheim in the catalog of the German National Library