Hans Beck (trade unionist)

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Hans Beck

Hans Willy Beck (born January 4, 1894 in Erfurt ( Thuringia ), † August 25, 1937 in the Soviet Union ) was a communist politician and trade unionist.

Life

Hans Beck was born on January 4, 1894 at Webergasse 16 in Erfurt. The mother is the unmarried Anna Luise Beck, the father is unknown. Beck completed an apprenticeship as a precision mechanic after eight years of elementary school. In 1912 he became a member of the German Metalworkers' Association and in 1913 the SPD . In 1914 he had to become a soldier. At that time he was working as a mechanic in the Erfurt Reichsbahn repair shop . At the beginning of 1919 he was a co-founder of the KPD in Thuringia and became a works council member. Then he went to the Zeiss works in Jena , where he became chairman of the workers' council in 1923 . Jena had long been a stronghold of the Marxist, anti-militarist left, and during the First World War a center of the Spartakusbund .

In KPD, KPD-O and the union

In 1924 Beck was elected to the Thuringian state parliament on the KPD list , to which he belonged until 1927. His group consisted of 13 MPs. During the first ultra-left phase of the KPD, attempts were made to found its own revolutionary trade unions . This led to the decline of communist influence in these major workers' organizations. Beck opposed this political line from the start. At the end of 1925 an attempt was made to correct this mistake, which is why the trade union work of the KPD members was now coordinated in a special trade union headquarters of the KPD in Berlin. As an experienced trade unionist, Hans Beck was called to Berlin for this task. Since the political split in the German labor movement, the ADGB Congress in Nuremberg in 1919 recognized that the delegates to the congresses were elected according to political lists and then appeared as parliamentary groups. The free trade unions , which set themselves the goal of a socialist society in their statutes, should behave neutrally towards the workers' parties. This gave rise to intense debates at the association days on trade union policy and general political developments. In the trade union department of the KPD headquarters, Beck was jointly responsible for the editor of “Einheit. Journal of Socialist Issues and Trade Union Unity ”. The title said it was program: Beck wanted to preserve the unity of the free unions in the free trade unions and to persuade them. Together with Robert Siewert , Hans Beck organized the trip of the “first workers' delegation” to the Soviet Union , in which 58 people took part. The enthusiasm for the first socialist country and the hospitality brightened the picture, and the big problems were less clearly perceived.

In 1928 Beck was relieved of his functions and expelled from the party with the new, final ultra-left turn - like many experienced functionaries and co-founders of the KPD. He became a member of the Communist Party Opposition (KPD-O), was elected to its Reich leadership and editor of Arbeiterpolitik , the daily newspaper of the KPD-O, which had to be converted to a weekly newspaper in 1932 due to the severe economic crisis .

In September 1932, shortly before the handover of power to the NSDAP , Hans Beck emigrated with his "wife" and their young daughter, via Norway / Oslo, where they married on July 8, 1933, to the Soviet Union on October 1, 1933, and was there Factory workers in Stalinsk / Kuznetsk, first in a metallurgical combine, then in the Moscow precision measuring equipment plant "Tispribor", then in a new thermometer factory. These were built by Thuringian workers from Elgersburg . Soon he made contact with these workers; he knew her well from his political work in Thuringia.

After the VII. World Congress of the Comintern , Beck applied for admission to the CPSU and accepted Soviet citizenship for his wife and two children. In his political isolation, he could not see that the new turn of the Comintern was only a means of Stalin's foreign policy, which wanted to signal to the democratic western powers that the parties he controlled were no longer revolutionary. Beck now assumed that the popular front proclaimed at the Congress was something similar to the united front against fascism called for by the KPD-O .

Stalinist persecution

In 1936, Hans Beck fell into the mill of the Stalin Purges , it was the phase of the Moscow trials . He was arrested on August 9, 1937 and sentenced by the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union to the maximum penalty of shooting and confiscation of property on August 25, 1937. The prosecution saw him as a “ Brandlerist ” and alleged that he wanted to carry out its directives in Moscow “as a representative of the right-wing opportunist Brandler Center”, which were aimed at fighting the leadership of the CPSU and the Soviet government and engaged in anti-Soviet agitation. He did not recognize the "guilty verdict". He was executed on the day of the verdict. Buried anonymously in the Donskoy cemetery in Moscow, buried in cemetery 1 with thousands of others in order to cover up all traces.

Elgersburg glass workers who had belonged to the KPD-O in their home country were accused of earlier membership in the KPD-O and their contacts with Hans Beck in later fire-fighting trials. The interrogation records show that despite the tough "interrogation" methods, they remained firm and in solidarity. Some were extradited to Hitler's Germany; two perished in the Soviet Union. Hans Beck's family survived with great difficulty and returned to the GDR in 1959. For Hans Beck, as for other revolutionaries, there was no contradiction between criticism of Stalin's policy and solidarity with the Soviet Union and help in building socialism.

On March 28, 1958, Hans Beck was posthumously rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR. His wife Tatjana and the children were sworn to silence in the Soviet Union and later in the GDR. After the "great murder and injustice" of millions of people, the "great oblivion" should begin.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bioweil: Collective biography of the members of the Landtag of the Weimar Republic: Thuringia 1920–1933 ( Memento from July 12, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
personal data
SURNAME Beck, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beck, Willy Hans (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Soviet communist and trade unionist
DATE OF BIRTH January 4, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Erfurt
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1937
Place of death Soviet Union