Gregor Kurella

Gregor Kurella (born May 26, 1925 in Möser near Magdeburg ; † January 12, 2016 in Moscow ) was a German who fought in the Red Army from 1942 to 1945.

Life

Gregor Kurella was born in 1925 as the son of the communist journalist Alfred Kurella .

In 1934, at the age of eight, he found political asylum with his parents in the USSR and attended the Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow . In 1942 Gregor Kurella volunteered for the Red Army and worked there in the 7th administration, in which his father Alfred was already working on the writing of leaflets and other propaganda tasks. He was sent to the Southwest Front in 1943 as an interpreter for the publication of leaflets and other information campaigns against the soldiers of the Wehrmacht . Among other things, it was his job to reach the positions of the Wehrmacht with the help of loudspeaker systems set up directly at the front and to convince the soldiers of the wrongness of their actions. The task was particularly dangerous as the speakers were regularly fired at.

Kurella took part in the liberation of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Hungary; he experienced the end of the war near Prague. From 1945 to 1949 he worked in the Soviet military administration in Germany , most recently as a youth officer. In 1949 he began studying biology at Moscow University and then worked as a biologist in Moscow.

When his widowed father married the widow of Stefan Cohn-Vossen in 1938, he became Richard Cohn-Vossen's older stepbrother .

Publications

• From school desk to the front to the Red Army - to the victory over Hitler fascism. Memories. In: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Volume II / 2015.