Gustav Gundelach

Gustav Gundelach (born December 19, 1888 in Kiel , † July 8, 1962 in Hamburg ) was a German KPD politician and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Gundelach completed an apprenticeship as a lathe operator and from 1908 worked at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg. Member of the SPD since 1909 , he joined the USPD in 1917 , where he belonged to the left wing, which merged with the KPD in 1920. In 1923 he took part in the Hamburg uprising . In 1924 he became a full-time party functionary and was elected to the Wasserkante district management, in addition he took over the management of the Red Aid in Hamburg. From 1924 to 1933 he was a member of the Hamburg parliament and from 1927/28 its vice-president.

After the seizure of power of the NSDAP in 1933 Gundelach went into hiding and was active in the underground resistance work of the KPD. In 1934 Gundelach worked on behalf of the Western European Office of International Red Aid in Austria, Norway and Denmark, and in 1935 in Romania and Switzerland. From January 1937 to June 1938 he went to Spain as an interbrigadist , where he headed the Red Cross of the interbrigades . In 1940 he came to Moscow; There he attended the International Lenin School in 1941/42 and from December 1942 worked for the National Committee for Free Germany . Until March 1945 he was speaker and editor at the German national broadcaster and from August 1943 he was also an employee of the broadcaster “Free Germany” . In April 1945 he returned to Germany as a member of the Ulbricht group and was President of the Central Administration for Labor and Social Welfare of the Soviet Occupation Zone until 1946 .

A year later he was sent to Hamburg to take over the leadership of the KPD. He was a member of the Hamburg parliament for the KPD in the first electoral period after the war. In June 1947 he left the citizenry as a parliamentarian . Gundelach was then a member of the zone advisory board in 1947/48 .

He was a member of the German Bundestag in the first legislative period ( 1949–1953 ). He became a member of the party executive committee of the KPD. After it was banned in 1956, he worked illegally for the party and in 1961 tried in vain to run as an independent individual candidate for the Bundestag.

In 1960 he was awarded the medal “ Fighters against Fascism ” in the GDR .

Works

• Documents of the Resistance. A contribution to understanding the illegal struggle against the Nazi dictatorship. A series of articles from the “ Hamburger Volkszeitung ” July to October 1947 . (Preface by Gustav Gundelach.) Albrecht and Evert, Hamburg-Bergedorf 1947
• The German voter. For peace, freedom, democracy . Edited by the KPD parliamentary group. Responsible editor Gustav Gundelach. February 1950 to July 2, 1951 Frequency: 2–3 times a week; at times daily.
• Attention! Mass rally in Bremen: Monday, February 4, 1952. Speakers: Kapitänleutnant Helmuth v. Mücke, Karl Wölz, member of the Bundestag Gustav Gundelach on the topic: No new 1933! - Defend the democratic rights of the German people [...] Recruitment means war . Working group for all-German issues, Bremen State Committee. Bremen 1952 leaflet
• The Bundestag member of the KPD: Gustav Gundelach gives an account! State leadership of the KPD, Hamburg 1953

literature

• Charlotte Kießling: The estate of the worker functionary Gustav Gundelach . Potsdam 1964 (Technical College for Archives, final thesis)
• Short biography in: Hermann Weber : The change of German communism. The Stalinization of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Volume 2 . Frankfurt / Main 1969, p. 164 f.
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• S. Finzelberg: Gundelach, Gustav . In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical Lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 178-179.
• Erna Milz: Die Rote Hilfe - Solidarity Organization of the International Working Class (With contributions by Gustav Gundelach, Mentona Moser , Rolf Helm ). In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement . Volume 19, Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1977, Issue 3, pp. 453-466
• Gottfried Hamacher. With the assistance of André Lohmar: Against Hitler - Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement: short biographies . Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin 2005. Volume 53. ISBN 3-320-02941-X ( PDF )
• Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Gustav Gundelach . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Gustav Gundelach's curriculum vitae on the website of the Independent Commission of Historians for Research into the History of the Reich Ministry of Labor 1933–1945

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hamburg Citizenship: The Hamburg Citizenship 1946-1971. Reconstruction and new building, illustrated by Erich Lüth , Verlag Conrad Kayser, Hamburg 1971.