Gottfried Grünberg

Gottfried Grünberg (born May 29, 1899 in Beuthen an der Oder ; † February 7, 1985 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( KPD / SED ). He was a member of a regional group of the Ulbricht group , the Sobottka group around Gustav Sobottka . After 1945 he was, among other things, Minister for Public Education of the State of Mecklenburg. From 1956 he was involved in leading positions in building up the NVA . At times he held the office of Deputy Minister for National Defense.

Life

First World War and Weimar Republic

Grünberg grew up as the son of a small farmer in Beuthen on the Oder . From the age of 6 to 14 he attended elementary school. Then he worked for a few years in the Upper Silesian coal mining area. Between February and December 1917 Grunberg took a cavalryman on the Balkan front the First World War in part. After he was interned in Hungary until 1918, he returned to Germany in 1919 and worked as a miner in the Ruhr area until 1931 , most recently in Baesweiler . Grünberg took 1920 as a fighter in the Ruhr Red Army at the Ruhr Uprising part. In the following years he became a functionary of the Red Aid and the Red Front Fighter League . In 1928 he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Because of his function as a functionary, for example as the political leader of a KPD local group or a member of the district management of the Free Miners' Association, Grünberg was temporarily excluded from the union and had to change his job several times. In addition, an investigation into arms smuggling was opened against him in 1931. He then emigrated to the USSR with his wife on behalf of the KPD .

Emigration to the Soviet Union and participation in the Spanish Civil War

In the Soviet Union Grünberg initially worked as a miner in the Donets Basin until 1933 . He then studied at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West (KUNMS) in Moscow under the code name Hauer . This study was followed by a study visit to the International Lenin School in Moscow until 1935; he had the code name Weber . In 1935 Grünberg was granted Soviet citizenship. After graduating, he was sent to the Kuznetsk Basin as a union instructor until 1937 . Then he attended a course for tactics of the engineer troops at the military school "First Cavalry Army" in Tambov .

After completing the course, Grünberg was sent to Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War. There he was leader of a pioneer company in the battalion "Jaroslaw Dombrowski" of the XIII until February 1939 . International Brigade . During this activity he was also a member of the Spanish Communist Party from 1938 . Between February and May 1939 Grünberg was arrested as the head of the Polish group in the French internment camp Argelès-sur-Mer . After his return to the USSR, he initially looked after Spanish emigrants until 1940 and worked as an instructor for the International Red Aid at the Gorki automobile plant . From 1941 Grünberg was a participant in the school of the Communist International in Pushkino near Moscow.

When war broke out on August 22, 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army . After receiving special military training, he became a member of the 1st Motorized Rifle Brigade in October 1941 at the special disposal of the NKVD . In March 1942 Grünberg was demobilized and delegated to the Comintern School in Kuschnarenkowo under the code name "Fritz Weber". In 1943 he was a co-founder of the National Committee Free Germany and was then initially employed as a teacher at the prisoner of war school in Krasnogorsk and shortly afterwards acted as director of the Antifa school in the village of Talizy. From the autumn of 1944 Grünberg was a student at Party School No. 12 in Moscow. In spring 1945 he was selected as a member of one of the first three initiative groups of the KPD for the Soviet zone of occupation . Grünberg became a member of a regional group of the Ulbricht group under Gustav Sobottka , which was active in Mecklenburg .

Activity in the Soviet Zone and the GDR

From May 12, 1945 Grünberg worked together with Anton Switalla in the Greifswald region and on the island of Rügen , where they stayed until June 1, 1945. With the relocation of the headquarters of the Sobottka Group, Grünberg came to Waren (Müritz) . He became a city councilor for some time. With the constitution of the state government of Mecklenburg on July 4, 1945, Grünberg had to give up his office in Waren. Grünberg became State Minister for National Education and Culture in the cabinet under Wilhelm Höcker . At the same time he was a member of the SED state leadership in Mecklenburg until 1950. In the spring of 1947 he was one of the founders of the Society for the Study of the Culture of the Soviet Union . The society was the direct predecessor of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship (DSF) , of which Grünberg was Secretary General from 1950 to 1956.

In 1956 he moved to the newly established NVA with the rank of lieutenant colonel . Grünberg became head of the Propaganda Department of the Political Headquarters of the NVA. For more than a year, from August 25, 1956 to November 28, 1957, he held the position of deputy minister for national defense in his capacity as head of the main political administration of the NVA. In 1960/1961 Grünberg was the GDR's military attaché in Moscow.

In 1962 he was released from the NVA for health reasons. In 1974 he was awarded the Karl Marx Order and in 1979 the Medal of Honor for the Patriotic Order of Merit . Until his death he held higher positions in mass organizations, such as deputy district chairman of the DSF in Berlin or as a member of the central management of the committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters .

His urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the memorial of the socialists at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried.

literature

• Peter Erler:  Grünberg, Gottfried . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Jeannette Michelmann: The activists of the first hour: the Antifa 1945 in the Soviet occupation zone between the occupying power and the exiled KPD (PDF; 1.2 MB) ; Dissertation, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, passim.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gottfried Grünberg in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus Froh, Rüdiger Wenzke : The generals and admirals of the NVA. A biographical manual. 4th edition. Ch. Links, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86153-209-3 .