Heinrich Fomferra

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Heinrich Fomferra (born November 19, 1895 in Essen-Schonnebeck , † May 31, 1979 in Berlin ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life and activity

Youth and Political Beginnings

Fomferra, son of a miner, attended elementary school and then worked as a miner and brickworker. In 1912 he became a member of the SPD .

From 1915 to 1918 Fomferra took part in the First World War as a conscript. In 1919 he joined the USPD . In 1920 he participated as a fighter in the Red Ruhr Army in the suppression of the Kapp Putsch . During this time he joined the Communist Workers' Party of Germany . For his involvement in the struggles to defend democracy, he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison . After his release from prison he worked as a construction worker and carpenter. In 1923 he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and leader of a proletarian hundred .

In 1924 Fomerra was convicted again for a political offense: He was sentenced to 16 months in prison for illegally possessing weapons.

From 1925 Fomferra acted as head of the Red Front Fighters Union (RFB) in Stoppenberg . In 1927 Fomferra became political leader of the KPD local group and employee of the organizational department of the KPD district leadership Ruhr .

Work abroad (1930 to 1945)

1930 Fomerra was to attend a course at the Military Political School of the Comintern after Moscow sent. Subsequently, he was a member of the staff of the KPD military apparatus and the BB apparatus before he returned to Moscow in 1932, where he now worked from 1932 to 1935 as a teacher at the Comintern's military political school. In this position he was subordinate to Wilhelm Zaisser . Then Fomferra took over duties as a courier for the secret service of the Comintern.

From July 1936 to 1937 Fomferra fought as a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans. He reached the rank of captain (captain) and was mainly active as an organizer and teacher of a partisan school.

In May 1937 Fomferra returned to Moscow, where he now attended a radio technology course from the Soviet military intelligence service GRU . As part of his subsequent work for the GRU apparatus, he stayed illegally in Germany in 1938. In August 1938 he was assigned to Johann Wenzel in Belgium as a radio operator.

In November 1939 Fomferra received the order to go to Hungary to set up a local GRU residency there. From 1940 he stayed in Slovakia . There he was involved in the development of partisan units and their deployment planning.

Fomferra had meanwhile been classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police forces: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be followed by special commands from the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht The SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

In February 1942, Fomferra was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to the Bratislava District Court . This sentenced him to twelve years in prison , which he temporarily spent in Ružomberok prison. In 1944 Fomferra was freed from prison by Slovak partisans and he took part in the Slovak National Uprising . He then worked as a political commissar of a partisan unit and, for a short time, in the provisional Slovak interior ministry.

post war period

In 1945 Fomferra returned to Germany. Until 1946 he was first head of personnel at the forestry office of the Brandenburg provincial administration . Then he was in the German Administration of the Interior (DVdI). In 1947 he took a position in the police department K 5 , from where he was transferred to the main administration for the protection of the national economy in November 1949.

In 1950 Fomferra moved to the Ministry of State Security (MfS) as head of the data collection and statistics department . In 1951 he took over the position of head of the secretariat of Minister Wilhelm Zaisser . In 1952 he was then chairman of the SED Party Control Commission (PKK) in the MfS. Because of his proximity to Zaisser, he had to leave the MfS in December 1953.

In May 1954 Fomferra switched to the service of the German Border Police , where he also served as chairman of the PKK.

In 1957 Fomferra became deputy head of the Röbelen office in the administration for patriotic education of the NVA , which served to prepare acts of sabotage in the Federal Republic of Germany . In 1959 he was released from the NVA and last lived as a working-class veteran in Berlin-Friedrichshain.

tomb

His urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the memorial of the socialists at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • On a special mission. In: Horst Köpstein (Ed.): Both sides of the border. About the common anti-fascist resistance struggle of Germans, Czechs and Slovaks from 1939 to 1945. German military publisher: Berlin 1965
  • How I became political commissar of a partisan unit. In: Heinz Vosske (Ed.): Proven in battle. Berlin 1969

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jens Giesecke, The full-time employees of the State Security, Links, 2000, p. 165
  2. ^ Entry on Fomferra on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum) .
  3. ↑ Jens Giesecke, The full-time employees of the State Security, Links, 2000, p. 94
  4. ↑ Jens Giesecke, The full-time employees of the State Security, Links, 2000, p. 165
  5. ↑ MfS-Handbuch, Jens Gieseke: BStU: Who was who in the Ministry for State Security ?, Berlin 1998, p. 23
  6. ^ Obituary notice in: Neues Deutschland from June 23, 1979
  7. ↑ Neues Deutschland from November 19, 1964
personal data
SURNAME Fomferra, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fomferra, Heinrich Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German policeman
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Essen-Schonnebeck
DATE OF DEATH May 31, 1979
Place of death Berlin