Gerhard Weck

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Gerhard Weck (born February 6, 1913 in Werdau ; † March 30, 1974 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German SPD politician and a victim of National Socialism and Stalinism .

Life

Gerhard Weck was born in the Saxon city of Werdau. His parents were active members of the SPD. His mother worked as a helper in the workers' welfare organization and his father, a trained milling cutter , was an SPD city councilor and district secretary in the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold . He himself attended elementary school and then secondary school in Werdau, which he graduated from high school at Easter 1933.

At the same time, Gerhard Weck was already eleven years old in social democratic children's groups and in 1927 became the first chairman of the newly founded Werdau local group in the Socialist Workers' Youth . In 1932 he became a member of the SPD and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, in which he was group leader. He had arguments with communists and national socialists. After the seizure of power of the NSDAP emigrated his parents in Czechoslovakia. He remained in exile in Germany as a liaison between the Saxon Social Democrats and the Sopade , the executive committee of the SPD. When his mother returned to Saxony, she was arrested and committed suicide in the police prison in Zwickau probably suicide . His father fled to Sweden, where he stayed after the Second World War.

Gerhard Weck was arrested together with his mother in the spring of 1933 for membership in the social democratic Jungbanner and for contacts with the Prague SPD exile executive committee and was imprisoned in the Sachsenburg concentration camp until Easter 1934 . After that he was unemployed. In September 1935 he was arrested again and sentenced to eighteen months in prison for “preparing for high treason ”. He was then taken into protective custody and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp . According to his own account, he was released there on April 20, 1939 and then worked as an unskilled worker in a textile company in Werdau. In the position of wool master he stayed there until the end of the war. Weck himself spoke and wrote nothing about his stay in the concentration camp. After the war, Hermann Kreutzer claimed that Weck had been in Buchenwald until the end of the war and had been drafted into Penal Division 999 towards the end of the war . The tradition also comes from Kreuzer that Weck later met a National Socialist and a Communist in the Bautzen prison, who had exchanged roles as prisoners and guards. Weck said that Communists and Nazis were interchangeable - but Social Democrats were not.

In May 1943 he and his wife became the father of a boy. After Werdau was liberated from the American army , Weck worked from May to September 1945 as an administrative clerk in the nutritional department of the city of Werdau. In September 1945 Werdau was taken over by the Soviet military administration and Weck was employed by them in various departments. After the local elections in the autumn of 1946 , he was appointed Lord Mayor of Werdau by the military administration.

He also became politically active almost immediately after the liberation. On August 1, 1945, he became a member of the re-established SPD and a short time later became local chairman in Werdau. The founding of the party in the Werdau area was not controlled from above, but happened at the local level. On the contrary, there was initially no contact with the headquarters in Berlin. The influence of the Soviet occupying power , which pushed for unification with the KPD, was more noticeable . After the compulsory unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED , SPD members met more conspiratorially. Members in public offices, such as Mayor Weck or District Administrator Karl Kautzsch , usually did not take part in the meetings, but delivered and received information through intermediaries. When the signs of increasing Stalinization became apparent, these meetings functioned as an exchange platform with the SPD's eastern office . Weck kept in constant contact with the office, even after most SPD members resignedly stopped believing in the continued existence of their party in the Soviet Zone in 1947 .

As an opponent of the compulsory union, Weck was arrested by members of the NKVD on December 21, 1948, at the time still Lord Mayor of Werdau, and imprisoned in the Dresden prison. The arrest was followed by a wave of arrests of people around him over the next two months. On June 13, 1949 the trial was against him, Karl Franke, Helmut Keil, Paul Trautner and Bernhard Rost. Weck was sentenced to 25 years of forced labor on the basis of Articles 58.6, 10 and 11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code for passing on information from the Soviet Zone to the East Office and for keeping newspapers of an anti-Soviet character and for forming groups .

After the verdict, he was imprisoned in Bautzen prison for one year and then in Görden prison. His father tried to remember his fate from Sweden and to get his release. On May 31, 1956, he was released as part of an amnesty for former Social Democrats. He fled to the West with his son in August 1956. His wife later followed.

They lived in Frankfurt am Main, where Weck was first subdistrict secretary and later manager of the SPD in 1957 . In 1960 he was elected to the Frankfurt city council, where he became chairman of his parliamentary group in 1964. He was considered a balancing and determined pragmatist, but at the end of the 1960s he resolutely opposed the looming left-wing course of his party. In 1970 he gave up all political offices and became managing director of the municipal dormitory GmbH. In the same year he was awarded the plaque of honor of the city of Frankfurt am Main . He died in 1974.

In Werdau, Friedrich-Engels-Strasse , where he lived until 1948, was renamed Gerhard-Weck-Strasse after the fall of the Berlin Wall and peaceful revolution in the GDR .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h i j Beatrix Bouvier : Gerhard Weck in Karl Wilhelm Fricke (Hrsg.): Opposition and resistance in the GDR. CH Beck, Munich 2002, pp. 95-101, ISBN 978-3-406-47619-8
  2. ^ Hermann Kreutzer: The relationship between victim biographies and the fate of perpetrators
  3. ^ Resistance to the forced unification of KPD and SPD , on the website of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
  4. ^ Lehmann & Werder Museum Media: Democratic Resistance in Germany . Retrieved September 17, 2015.
  5. ^ GDR, Myth and Reality: Resistance against the forced unification of the KPD and SPD