Gustav Sobottka

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Gustav Sobottka (born  July 12,  1886 in Turowen ( Johannisburg district , East Prussia ), †  March 6,  1953 in Berlin ) was a German politician.

Life

Gustav Sobottka was the son of the farm laborer couple Adam and Auguste Sobottka. In 1895 the family moved to Röhlinghausen (today the most south-westerly district of Herne ) in the Ruhr area . The Sobottkas belonged to the strictly religious " muckers ". In 1901 Gustav was confirmed and began working in the mining industry in the same year. In 1909 he married the maid Henriette (Jettchen) Schantowski. The couple had a daughter and two sons. From August 1914 to November 1918 Gustav Sobottka took part in the First World War.

In 1910 Sobottka joined the SPD ; his wife followed him in 1912. He later co-founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and joined the Communist Party of Germany in late 1920 . In addition, Sobottka was a founding member and head of the mining group in the KPD-affiliated union Union of Hand and Brain Workers , whose transfer to the ADGB he initially opposed in 1925, but then managed to do it together with Anton Jadasch .

From 1921 to 1932 he was a member of the KPD in the Prussian state parliament and head of the mining industry group at the KPD Central Committee . After his exclusion from the free trade union miners association in 1928 he was in 1929 one of the founders and management members of the RGO . In 1930 he became General Secretary of the Miners' International Federation . He was no longer a candidate for the Prussian state election on April 24, 1932 and took on a role in the Red Aid apparatus . After the takeover of the Nazi party , he worked in the underground, then in the Saar and in Paris. In the spring of 1935 he was ordered to Moscow by the Red Trade Union International . Towards the end of 1935, Jettchen Sobottka and the youngest son Gustav also came to the Soviet Union via Paris.

The older son Bernhard stayed in Germany. He was temporarily in a concentration camp and died, also of the consequences of his imprisonment, in the summer of 1945. Gustav junior initially did an apprenticeship in Moscow. In February 1938, during the time of the Great Terror , he was arrested there as a member of an alleged Hitler Youth organization. He died in custody in September 1940.

In 1945 Gustav Sobottka, who had to give up his trade union work in connection with the arrest of his son, returned from the Soviet Union to the Soviet occupation zone as head of a KPD group for Mecklenburg , the Sobottka subgroup of the Ulbricht group .

From 1947 to 1948 he was President of the Central Administration for the Fuel Industry ; from 1949 to 1951 he was head of the coal headquarters in the GDR Ministry of Heavy Industry.

tomb

Gustav Sobottka died on March 6, 1953 in Berlin after his honorary retirement as a " Honored Miner of the GDR ". His urn was buried in the memorial of the socialists in the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin-Lichtenberg . The rehabilitation of his son Gustav in 1956, a phase of de-Stalinization , was only seen by Jettchen Sobottka.

Honors

literature

Movies

  • On the secret of a revolutionary - thinking about Gustav Sobottka , documentary, 45 minutes, Germany 1995, director: Hans-Dieter Rutsch, commissioned by WDR, editor: Beate Schlanstein

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chronicle of the MIF here
  2. ↑ His personal secretary was Elli Barczatis . Barczatis was convicted of espionage in 1955 and executed .
  3. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke , Roger Engelmann (1998): Concentrated Strikes: State Security Actions and Political Processes in the GDR 1953-1956 , p. 183 ( online )
personal data
SURNAME Sobottka, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sobottka, Gustave
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, KPD)
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Turowen ( District of Johannisburg , East Prussia )
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1953
Place of death Berlin