Gregor Kersche

Gregor Kersche (born May 11, 1892 in Suetschach , † after 1950 in the Soviet Union ) was a Carinthian Slovene and politician of the Communist Party of Austria .

Life

Born in the Feistritz region in Rosental in 1892 , Gregor Kersche grew up speaking German and Slovene. After completing compulsory school, he attended the mechanical engineering college in Klagenfurt . In 1910 he joined the Social Democratic Labor Party and the Metalworkers' Association. During the First World War , Kersche was stationed as a soldier on the Russian front, where he was taken prisoner in 1915. In the prisoner of war camp he joined the Bolsheviks and became a member of the workers ', peasants and soldiers' council in Tula after the end of the war . After his return to Austria, Kersche joined the Communist Party of Austria in 1919 and participated in the founding of the regional party organization in Carinthia , which he headed for several years. He became a member of the Central Committee of the KPÖ and rose to a member of the party's Politburo in 1929, where he was responsible for agricultural issues and agitation among smallholders. Another political focus of Kersches was housing policy, preventing evictions and chasing away pledges in the Klagenfurt area. Because of his bilingualism, Kersche ran communist agitation among Carinthian Slovenes.

Because of his political activities, Kersche was repeatedly imprisoned after the Communist Party was banned from 1933 until he finally emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1935. There, too, he was active in the interests of the Austrian communists and wrote a declaration on the right of the Carinthian Slovenes to self-determination as part of the Comintern Congress in Moscow . With the beginning of the Second World War , Kersche completed training in the Soviet Union to work as a parachute agent in the Third Reich . In 1943 he was in Vienna , where he made contact with various anti-fascist resistance groups. There he was arrested in January 1944 and severely abused by the Gestapo during interrogation . In biographies of Gregor Kersche, the assumption is made that he passed on sensitive data about other parachute agents to the Gestapo in the course of the interrogations. After the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Vienna by the Red Army , Kersche was arrested by the Soviet secret police on April 22, 1945 and sentenced to ten years in a camp in the Soviet Union. In 1956 he was rehabilitated. After his imprisonment, Gregor Kersche probably continued to live in the Soviet Union under the name Franz Wehle (or Weller). The circumstances of his death, as well as the date and place of death, are unknown.

literature

• Marie Tidl: Gregor Kersche: regional chairman of the KPÖ-Carinthia 1920–1932. A life based on documents and stories . In-house printer of the KPÖ, Carinthia 1991.
• Daniel Jamritsch: Lower left in Carinthia. Communists in the south of Austria . Hermagor, Vienna 2018, ISBN 978-3-200-05879-8 .

Web links

• Entry on Gregor Kersche in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance
• Report on the KPÖ in the state of Carinthia at science.orf.at