Herbert Lessig

Herbert Lessig (born July 5, 1902 in Dresden , † August 18, 1966 in London ) was a German political functionary ( KPD ).

Life and activity

Lessig grew up in Leipzig before his family moved to Berlin in 1911 . After attending school, he learned the profession of printer . Since 1919 he was a member of the union.

Lessig began to be politically active in the 1920s: in 1925 he became a member of the Red Aid and in 1929 of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He worked as a printer in the city print shop of the KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne .

In 1931 Lessig was recruited by Ernst Schneller for the anti-militarist apparatus of the KPD. At the end of 1932 he was sent to Moscow, where he attended the Comintern M school . Due to political developments in Germany, he broke off his course there prematurely and returned to Berlin, where he took on tasks as an instructor in the Berlin sub-districts of Schöneberg, Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg. During this time he was in contact with Walter Ulbricht and August Creutzburg .

In 1933 (?) Lessig was arrested because of his involvement in a shooting in Schleiermacherstrasse, but was released a few days later. One proceeding against him has been dropped. He kept silent about this episode in later years in order not to be excluded from being used in the AM apparatus.

At the end of 1934 Lessig received an order from the Central Committee to end political work in Berlin and to travel to Prague . Here, under the code name "Bert", he was appointed head of the defense department of the KPD in exile before he was entrusted with the management of the entire cadre department of the Czech emigre organization in August 1935.

In January 1936 Lessig became deputy head of the defense apparatus now led by Hermann Nuding . In this position he procured, among other things, the indictment against Ernst Thälmann and organized the escape of Thälmann's lawyer Friedrich Roetter abroad.

After being denounced as a Gestapo agent, he was ordered to report in Paris in September 1937 and, against Nuding's objection , was expelled from the KPD in 1938 by the KPD's foreign secretariat in Paris ( Paul Bertz , Franz Dahlem and Paul Merker ). According to Lessig himself, the information was given to him by Walter Ulbricht at the beginning of 1938 without further explanation.

Through the mediation of Konrad Reissner , the secretary of the League for Human Rights in Paris, Lessig received board and lodging in the Jewish asylum for the homeless.

At the beginning of the Second World War , Lessig was interned as a German citizen in France. However, he managed to escape to Casablanca in June 1940 . Until 1943 he was interned there in various camps before he was released through the mediation of the Quakers . He then enlisted in the English Army, which he belonged to until 1947.

He then lived in London, where he worked as a book printer. In the 1950s and 1960s he tried to get recognition as a victim of Nazi persecution by the Senate of West Berlin.

literature

• 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 ( online ).
• Bernd Kaufmann et al.: The KPD's intelligence service: 1919–1937 , Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1993.