Georg Kenzler

Georg Kenzler (born October 20, 1884 in Mannheim , † January 1, 1959 in East Berlin ) was a communist politician.

After the politically motivated dismissal of his father, the son of a union blacksmith had to move with his family from Mannheim to Frankenthal , where he learned the metalworking trade. After his apprenticeship on the road for a few years, he joined the socialist youth movement and in 1908 the SPD .

In 1917 the opponent of the truce policy of the SPD leadership joined the newly founded USPD , was briefly drafted into military service in a pioneer unit in 1918 and took part in the November Revolution in his home town of Mannheim . At the end of 1920, Kenzler joined forces with the left wing of the USPD to join the KPD; in 1921 he became local chairman, in 1922 city councilor and full-time secretary of the KPD. Belonging to the “left” wing around Ruth Fischer , he was elected political leader of the Baden party district in early 1924 and elected to the Reichstag in May of that year , to which he belonged until 1928. In the years that followed, Kenzler was arrested several times for violations of press law due to his function as the person responsible for press law at the Mannheimer Arbeiterzeitung , but had to be released after a short time due to his immunity to parliamentarians .

After the fall of the party leadership around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow in 1925, he was relieved of his party functions by the Thälmann leadership in 1926, was one of the most important exponents of the party left in Baden with Jakob Ritter and became after participating in a meeting with Hugo Urbahns in July Excluded from the party in 1927 and joined the parliamentary group Left Communists ; He compared the party proceedings against him with an inquisition tribunal . Briefly arrested after the dissolution of the Reichstag in 1928, he stood unsuccessfully for the Lenin League in the Reichstag elections and briefly opened an inn in Mannheim. In 1929 he also left the Lenin League and rejoined the SPD and moved to Berlin, where he maintained contact with other left-wing parties who had been excluded from the KPD and worked as an insurance employee.

During the period of the Third Reich he was imprisoned several times and released from his previous position. After liberation in 1945 he was able to work again for an insurance company and later also joined the SED without taking on this function; critical of the politics of the SED, he withdrew from politics in the last years of his life.

literature

• Kenzler, Georg . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Georg Kenzler in the database of members of the Reichstag