Harry Schmitt

Harry Schmitt (born September 17, 1919 in Halle / Saale ; † October 27, 1999 in Berlin ) was a German KPD functionary and head of the DKP military organization group Ralf Forster .

Schmitt was the son of the Reichstag member and later Bavarian State Minister Heinrich Schmitt . In 1933 his family went into exile in Moscow . In Moscow he attended the Karl Liebknecht School . Admitted to the Komsomol in 1934 , he worked as a locksmith in a research institute. After his father was convicted in Germany in 1935, he and his mother, Anna Schmitt, were stripped of their German citizenship. In 1936 he received citizenship of the USSR.

On February 17, 1938, he was arrested by the secret police of the NKVD in Moscow for alleged membership of the Hitler Youth . Badly mistreated in the Lubyanka , he was sentenced to five years in a labor camp on October 10, 1938. In 1940, after Georgi Dimitrov and Wilhelm Pieck intervened, Schmitt was released from Moscow's Butyrka prison and rehabilitated by the military prosecutor's office.

On June 22, 1941, the day of the attack on the Soviet Union , Schmitt became a member of the KPD , a volunteer in the Red Army . He served as a military scout behind the front in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. On February 22, 1942, he was captured by the German SD (security service) in the Minsk area and imprisoned in the SD prison and later Maly Trostinez extermination camp . On September 19, 1942, he succeeded in an organized escape and liberation instructed by the Soviet military reconnaissance. From 1943 he was used largely as a lone fighter in Germany. He experienced the end of the war as a guard captain in a group of the 2nd Byelorussian Front north of Berlin.

In summer 1945 he was released from the Red Army as guard captain and initially lived in Bavaria . Harry Schmitt worked as a functionary in the KPD. For a time he was head of the party control commission.

In 1953 he moved from Düsseldorf to the GDR . He continued to work in the KPD. In the early 1960s he was secretary of the Politburo and the secretariat of the Central Committee of the KPD. From 1968 he lived in Frankfurt am Main and was active in the newly founded German Communist Party . He was head of the paramilitary organization group Ralf Forster .

literature

• Hermann Weber : Who was »Ralf Forster«? The head of the DKP military organization in the mirror of memory and the MfS files. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism 2006, pp. 297-310. Berlin: Construction, 2006. ISBN 978-3-351-02686-8 .