Gustav Pötzsch

Gustav Pötzsch (born August 19, 1898 in Rixdorf near Berlin ; † May 28, 1963 in Berlin-Lichtenberg ) was a German KPD functionary and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Pötzsch came from a working class family. He completed an apprenticeship with the railroad . From 1917 to 1919 he did military service in a machine gun company. During a front-line deployment in Flanders , he was so badly wounded that his left lower leg had to be amputated .

After the First World War he worked, among other things, as a conductor for the Berlin transport company (BVG). In 1919 he joined the USPD and became a member of the Transport Workers' Union . At the end of 1920 he switched to the KPD in Berlin-Neukölln. In June 1929 Pötzsch was on the XII. Weddinger party congress elected to the central committee of the KPD.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , from February 1933 he organized illegal work within the BVG. He was arrested and remained in " protective custody " from August to December 1933 . In April 1935 he emigrated to Czechoslovakia to Prague , then to the Soviet Union . In Moscow he was a student at the International Lenin School . In July 1937 he returned to Prague and worked as an instructor for couriers who went to Berlin for illegal work.

After German troops occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 , Pötzsch fled to Poland and later on to Norway . From 1940 to 1946 he stayed in Sweden , where he was temporarily interned.

Pötzsch returned to Germany in May 1946. He joined the SED and became head of the BVG. Until 1961 he was responsible for the SED operational groups in western Berlin.

literature

• Michael F. Scholz: Would you like some Scandinavian experience? Post-exile and remigration. The former KPD emigrants in Scandinavia and their further fate in the Soviet Zone / GDR . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, p. 367.
• Hans-Joachim Fieber et al. (Ed.): Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime 1933 to 1945. A biographical lexicon. Volume 8. Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2005, p. 161.
• Pötzsch, Gustav . In: 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 .