Hans Pfeiffer (politician)

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Hans Walter Pfeiffer (born April 24, 1895 in Johanngeorgenstadt ; † April 3, 1968 in Zeesen ) was a communist German politician.

Life

After attending elementary school in Johanngeorgenstadt, he began training as a mechanic in Chemnitz . He then worked as a toolmaker in Nuremberg , Bern , Kassel and Berlin . He became a member of the German Metalworkers' Association in 1912 and went on a wandering tour in various countries in southwestern Europe immediately before the First World War .

In May 1913 he joined the SPD and was briefly an anarchist after the outbreak of war in 1914 . Unfit for health reasons, Pfeiffer was not called up for military service and after its founding in 1917 joined the USPD and was a founding member of the KPD . After the end of the November Revolution , he worked as party secretary for the KPD from May 1919 in Magdeburg , Nuremberg (where he had to serve a six-week prison sentence after the Kapp Putsch in 1920 for illegal residence) and Berlin. During this time he was nicknamed " Kartothekowitsch " because of his meticulousness in organizational issues . In the capital of the Reich he belonged to the KPD headquarters in 1923/24 and belonged to the middle group around Gerhart Eisler , Heinz Neumann and Arthur Ewert . Here he got involved in the dispute over the high treason trial against the headquarters of the KPD and served 17 months in custody in Berlin until 1925 .

In 1924 he was elected to the German Reichstag for the KPD , but was initially prevented from exercising his mandate because of his imprisonment. After his release from prison he represented the KPD in parliament until 1930 and worked for the Comintern from 1929 to autumn 1932 in Moscow and Czechoslovakia , among others . In November 1932 he was re-elected to the Reichstag, but was not re-elected as a candidate in 1933.

After the takeover of the Nazi Party and the Reichstag fire Pfeiffer went into hiding and was under the pseudonym Kurt Mittendorf mainly with the reconstruction of battered by the repression party structures in the Rhine-Ruhr responsible. However, he was arrested in June 1933 with a suitcase full of party documents and in the following year made an extensive confession in court about his activities. Pfeiffer was to three years in prison convicted. After his release from prison he worked as a toolmaker until the end of the National Socialist regime in 1945. His wife was imprisoned in a concentration camp .

In 1945 he was first in the leadership of the KPD in Senftenberg and then in Cottbus and in 1946 also became a member of the SED , in which he was not entrusted with any function. In the GDR he only held subordinate functions in the administration of the Königs Wusterhausen district ; his seventieth birthday and his death were not mentioned in the New Germany , unlike other “party veterans” of similar importance . The SED ostracized Hans Pfeiffer even after his death, on the grounds that because he, extensive information on his international work in the concentration camp when he had not had it necessary Profintern made have.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Letter from the head of the SED Central Committee's cadre department , Fritz Müller , dated October 20, 1970 to the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the SED Central Committee, in the Central Party Archives of the SED, now in the Federal Archives, cited by: Hermann Weber (ed. And initiated): The founding of the KPD. P. 9
personal data
SURNAME Pfeiffer, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfeiffer, Hans Walter; Kartothekowitsch (nickname); Mittendorf, Kurt (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, USPD, KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Johanngeorgenstadt
DATE OF DEATH 3rd April 1968
Place of death Zeesen