Herta Geffke

Herta Geffke , (married Kaasch ) (born August 19, 1893 in Bollinken ; † December 29, 1974 in Berlin ), was a German SED functionary and resistance fighter against National Socialism . As a member of the Central Party Control Commission , she was jointly responsible for Stalinist purges in the SED in the 1950s.

Life

The daughter of a shoemaker from Bollinken in the Randow district , after attending primary school, initially worked as a household helper and later as a printing worker. In 1908 she joined the Socialist Workers' Youth . She became a member of the SPD in 1912 , joined the USPD in 1917 and finally joined the KPD in 1920 . She was the full-time district secretary of the KPD Pomerania and from March 1921 women's secretary for the Lower Rhine and Ruhr districts. She was delegated to the Third World Congress of the Communist International and the Second International Women's Congress in Moscow in 1921 . From 1921 to 1925 she was a member of the Prussian state parliament . Between 1922 and 1928 she was married to the communist functionary Wienand Kaasch . From 1929 to 1933 she worked in the district management of the KPD Rhineland - Ruhr area . From 1931 she worked for the Red Aid of Germany Baden-Palatinate and from 1933 was a member of its central board.

After the Reichstag election in 1933 , she worked illegally politically. In September of the same year she was arrested and, after six months of “ protective custody ”, was sentenced in 1934 to two and a half years in prison for preparation for high treason. She was imprisoned in the Ziegenhain penitentiaries near Kassel and Jauer in Silesia. From 1937 she was trained as a men's tailor in Stettin and then worked in this profession. She resumed illegal party activity and belonged to the resistance organization around Werner Krause and Walter Empacher in 1943/44 .

After the end of the Second World War , she contacted the KPD group around Gustav Sobottka and was entrusted with the management of the NKFD's Antifa school in Stettin-Krekow. From June 1945 to March 1946 she headed the State Youth Welfare Office in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. From July 1945 she was responsible for women in the KPD state leadership in Mecklenburg, and from April 1946 secretary for women at the state executive committee of the SED Mecklenburg. In 1946 she was a member of the board of directors of the Mecklenburg Advisory Assembly and until 1950 belonged to the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania State Parliament , of which she was the third vice-president. From 1947 she was a member of the state secretariat of the SED Brandenburg . In 1947/48 she was a member of the central board of the VVN . From March 1948 to May 1949 she was a member of the German People's Council .

From 1949 she was active in the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK) of the SED, where she was responsible, alongside Hermann Matern, for the party's cleansing operations “from hostile and degenerate elements”. Here she headed a special commission from November, which was supposed to uncover connections of party members to Noel Field . In 1954 she became deputy chairwoman of the ZPKK. In 1958 she took over the management of the management department at the Institute for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED. In 1962 she retired with an honorary pension from the party.

Herta Geffke received the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver on May 6, 1955 , the Karl Marx Order in 1955 and the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold in 1968. In 1973 a polytechnic high school was named after her in Berlin-Johannisthal .

literature

• Martin Broszat , Hermann Weber (ed.): SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany 1945-1949. On behalf of the Department of History and Politics of the GDR at the University of Mannheim . 2nd edition 1993, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1993, ISBN 978-3-486-55262-1 , p. 907
• Klaus Schwabe: State election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 1946 . Landtag Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (ed.), Schwerin 1996, pp. 83–84.
• Bernd-Rainer Barth , Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Geffke, Herta . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• 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 , pp. 285-286.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Rolf Bartusel: Geffke-Kaasch, Herta (1893 - 1974). In: MV-DATA The biographical database. Retrieved April 18, 2009 . 
2. ↑ Heinz Mohnhaupt, Karl A Mollnau, Annerose Gündel (ed.): Norm enforcement in Eastern European post-war societies (1944-1989). Introduction to legal development with source documentation / German Democratic Republic 1958-1989 . 1st half volume, Vittorio Klostermann, 2003, ISBN 978-3-465-03241-0 , p. 316 ( digitized version )
3. ↑ School without Racism , Neues Deutschland from May 25, 2013

Web links

• Literature about Herta Geffke in the state bibliography MV
• Works by Herta Geffke in the state bibliography MV