Heinrich Schlagewerth

Heinrich Schlagewerth (born May 2, 1890 in Duisburg ; † August 11, 1951 there ) was a communist German politician.

Life

The trained construction worker moved to Mönchengladbach before the First World War and was drafted into the infantry at the beginning of the war in 1914 . Wounded there, he developed into a war opponent, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 1916 for " unauthorized removal from the troops" and joined the USPD in 1918 , where he belonged to the left wing of the party, which in 1920 merged with the KPD to form the VKPD .

Since 1923 chairman of the KPD in Mönchengladbach, Schlagewerth belonged to the "ultra-left" wing of the KPD and moved into the Reichstag in December 1924 for the constituency of Düsseldorf-West , to which he belonged until 1928. In the factional struggles within the KPD, he worked closely with Ernst Schwarz and above all with Karl Korsch and was expelled from the KPD in August 1926. The KPD later tried - unsuccessfully - to win back impact for the party, Philipp Dengel offered him 2000 Reichsmarks in this context. In the Reichstag he joined the group of the Left Communists and was responsible for the journal Communist Politics published by the Korsch group . In addition, he was an independent communist city councilor in Mönchengladbach until 1931 and, since 1929, chairman of the local branch of the left-communist trade union German Industry Association (DIV).

After the "takeover" of the NSDAP , Schlagewerth and his group were active in the illegality in the resistance against National Socialism and cooperated with other left organizations in the Mönchengladbach area. After the first criminal proceedings against him had been discontinued in 1935, he was arrested again by the police in October 1936 and charged various resistance fighters in the region with his statements. The Gestapo was able to smash the local structures of the KPD, KPO , FAUD and IKD on the basis of the information provided by Schlagewerth . In his statements, Schlagewerth stated that between 1934 and 1936 he had changed from a communist to a national socialist, and besides, with anti-Semitic undertones, he incriminated KPO functionary Dagobert Lubinski , who was later murdered in Auschwitz . Overall, Schlagewerth's submissions led to legal proceedings against at least 57, according to other information against up to 300 people. He himself was sentenced by the OLG Hamm in 1938 to three years in prison and loss of honor . After serving his sentence, due to the intervention of the local Gestapo, he was not transferred to a concentration camp as ordered by the Reich Security Main Office , but was released.

From 1939 to 1945 he lived and worked in Duisburg and Osnabrück, after the liberation from National Socialism he was no longer politically active.

literature

• Short biography in: Hermann Weber : The change of German communism. The Stalinization of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Volume 2. Frankfurt am Main 1969, pp. 275-276.
• Schlagewerth, 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 .

Web links

• Heinrich Schlagewerth in the database of members of the Reichstag