Heinrich Susskind

Henry Susskind (* 30th October 1895 in Kolomea ; † 3. October 1937 in Moscow ) was a communist politician and journalist, pseudonyms were u. a. Heinrich and Kurt .

Life

The son of a rabbi from Galicia (today Ukraine ) began studying law, economics and philosophy in Vienna in 1914 and moved to the University of Tübingen in 1918 , where he joined the Free Socialist Youth , and in 1919 he joined the KPD . Expelled from Württemberg at the end of 1919, at the instigation of Wilhelm Pieck and Clara Zetkin, the Süßkind, who lived illegally in Germany, began to work for various KPD newspapers and first became the political editor of the Red Flag , then the editor of the Socialist Republicin Cologne and from December 1921 as successor to Ernst Meyer's editor-in-chief of the newspaper Die Rote Fahne . Expelled from Germany in 1922, he worked for the Comintern in Riga and Moscow for some time .

In the spring of 1923 Süßkind returned to Berlin, where he again until terminated by August Thalheimer was replaced, The Red Flag headed. In the next two years he belonged to the left wing of the party and edited a. a. the party newspapers in Leipzig and Chemnitz, until he was appointed to the editorial team of the Rote Fahne for the third time in 1925 after Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow had been replaced from the party leadership.In 1927 he took over the post of editor-in-chief again until 1928. At times belonging to the parliamentary group around Ernst Thälmann , he joined the internal opposition group of the Compromisers in 1928 and was relieved of his party functions after the Wittorf affair . Together with Karl Volk , Süsskind was part of the leadership of the "Compromisers", which worked as a covert movement within the Berlin KPD, until 1933.

In 1933, after the transfer of power to the NSDAP , Süsskind fled first to Prague , where his wife was from, and then to the Soviet Union , where he took on various tasks in the Comintern apparatus. In 1935 his party membership was initially suspended for a year, in the summer of 1936 he fell completely into the Stalinist purges and was arrested by the NKVD on October 3, 1937, on 3 October 1937 on charges of being a “conciliator” and “ Trotskyist ” and “ having ties to terrorists” “Sentenced to death and shot the same day.

literature

• Sweet child, Heinrich . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .