Hermann Taubenberger

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Hermann Taubenberger (born November 21, 1892 in Munich ; † May 29, 1937 ) was a German communist who was a victim of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union .

Life

Taubenberger studied at the Munich Polytechnic Institute and worked as a railway engineer in Spain for some time. As a one-year volunteer in World War I, he was wounded and tried on a court martial in 1917. At the end of 1918 he returned to Munich, became a member of the workers 'and soldiers' council there and took part in the armistice negotiations in Spa as its representative . In 1919 he joined the KPD and during the fighting of the Bavarian Soviet Republic was commander of the "Red Army" on the Dachau front section.

On May 14, 1919, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment, which he served in Niederschönenfeld . After his release he moved to Stuttgart . He was employed by the AM apparatus ("Antimilitary Apparat", the KPD's intelligence service) and in 1923 commissioned to set up combat formations for the planned " German October ". After these plans failed, he was arrested in Stuttgart in February 1924, but was able to escape from custody to Paris in the autumn and emigrate to the Soviet Union.

There Taubenberger worked first in an electrical works, then in a Stalingrad cannon factory. He became a member of the CPSU and worked as an engineer at the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry. Meanwhile, Taubenberger wanted to return to Germany with his family, but did not receive an exit permit because of his employment in the Soviet armaments industry. He stayed with the Supreme Economic Council , was a member of the Presidium of the Technical and Scientific Committee for Mechanical Engineering and deputy chairman of the Council for the Aircraft Industry.

On the evening of March 5, 1933, several German Communists met in the Taubenberger's Moscow apartment, including Erich Wollenberg , Werner Rakow , Hans Schiff, Karl Schmidt and Erich Tacke . During a discussion about the Reichstag elections, they sharply criticized the German party leadership. Schmidt reported this to the party secretary Fritz Heckert . Rakow and Wollenberg were expelled from the CPSU, Taubenberger received a reprimand. The NKVD later took the private meeting at Taubenberger as an occasion for a large-scale purge, which ended fatally for Schmidt too.

Taubenberger was expelled from the party in 1936 for " Trotskyist - Zinovievist and other counterrevolutionary crimes against the working class". He was arrested on September 17, 1936 and sentenced to death by shooting by the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR on May 29, 1937 for “participating in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization”. The sentence was carried out on the same day. His ashes were buried in a mass grave in Moscow's Donskoy cemetery.

family

Hermann Taubenberger was married to Else Taubenberger until the early 1930s. She spent a few years in camp detention and exile and died in 1968 (according to other sources in 1972), shortly after her return to Munich.

The son Heinz (* 1915) was also sentenced to death and shot in 1937, Hermann Taubenberger jun. (* 1923) came to an NKVD children's home and is considered missing. After the arrest of Carola Neher and Anatol Becker , the Taubenbergers took care of their one and a half year old son Georg Becker. He then came to an NKVD camp for orphans and was only able to leave for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1975.

Hermann Taubenberger's second wife was Soja Martschenko (1907–2000).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reinhard Müller: Human trap Moscow. Exile and Stalinist Persecution , p. 434
  2. ↑ Hermann Taubenberger on gulag.memorial.de , see documents there
  3. ↑ Else Taubenberger on gulag.memorial.de
  4. ↑ Soja Dmitrijewna Martschenko on gulag.memorial.de
personal data
SURNAME Taubenberger, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist, victim of Stalinism
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1937