Hugo Urbahns

Hugo Urbahns (born February 18, 1890 in Lieth , Dithmarschen , † November 16, 1946 near Stockholm ) was a communist politician.

Life

From peasant ratios derived graduated Urbahns the middle school and the training of primary school teachers in Bad Segeberg and the then the German Reich associated Tonder , he was then in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg engaged in the teaching profession. Urbahns, who had contacts with socialist circles from 1912, initially volunteered for military service, but was later retired due to tuberculosis .

Radicalized by the war experience, Urbahns joined the Spartakusbund in Hamburg and, after its founding, the KPD . In the Hamburg party organization he belonged to the small minority that did not join the KAPD after 1920 . Urbahns, who was also a delegate at the unification party congress of the KPD and the USPD-Left , trained from 1921 to 1924, u. a. with Ernst Thälmann , coming from the USPD , the closer leadership of the Hamburg KPD, which he also represented in the Hamburg citizenship since 1921 , where he was soon known as a sharp-tongued speaker.

Urbahns belonged to the left wing of the party, but unlike most KPD leftists, did not refuse to cooperate with the SPD in concrete actions. In the Hamburg uprising of 1923, in the preparation of which Urbahns was centrally involved, he acted as political leader and as a link between the political and military leadership of the uprising and had to go into hiding after the failure of the uprising. From underground he criticized the fact that the party leadership around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer had not supported the action of the Hamburg KPD with surveys in other regions.

When Urbahns gave a speech at a memorial rally in honor of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in early 1924 , he was arrested. Although he was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924 , he remained imprisoned until October 1925. In January 1925 he was sentenced to ten years in prison as the main defendant who assumed full political responsibility for the Hamburg uprising during the trial . Ultimately released due to his parliamentary immunity , Urbahns took up his political activities in the Reichstag and in the KPD Central Committee, to which he was elected in absentia in July 1925. In the factional struggles he was one of the most prominent spokesmen of the left wing alongside Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow and began to criticize the developing Stalinist general line of the party and the Comintern .

In November 1926 Urbahns was expelled from the KPD, and solidarity through the declaration of 1000 was unsuccessful. Urbahns moved to Berlin and became a leading representative of the parliamentary group of the Left Communists , the Left Opposition in Germany, and played a key role in founding the Lenin League , which he chaired from 1928 to 1933. In 1929/30 there was a break with Leon Trotsky after he vehemently criticized Urbahns' view that the Soviet Union was moving towards capitalism and pursuing an imperialist policy towards China . Since 1929, Urbahns focused on the creation of an anti-fascist united front against National Socialism .

After the " seizure of power " by the NSDAP in 1933, Urbahns, who had severely attacked the National Socialists on various occasions in the years before, had to flee abroad. On March 29, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the second expatriation list of the German Reich through which he was expatriated . After a short stay in the Czechoslovak Republic , he was able to settle in Sweden , where he had to survive as a woodworker and printer under sometimes poor conditions and tried to maintain the structures of exile of the Lenin League . From 1936 to 1938, during the Moscow trials , which Urbahns attacked sharply, the Soviet embassy in Stockholm under Ambassador Alexandra Kollontai tried to get his expulsion from Sweden, which could only be averted because no other country wanted to accept Urbahns.

After the end of World War II , Urbahns refused to return to Germany.

literature

• Hugo Urbahns - communist and "revolutionary" in Hamburg and his ancestors. In: Journal for Low German Family Studies. Volume 74, 1999, ISSN  0945-7461 , pp. 207-210
• Urbahns, Hugo . 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 .
• Marcel Bois: In the fight against Stalinism and fascism. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic (1924–1933). In: Kora Baumbach u. a. (Ed.): Currents. Political images, texts and movements (PDF; 12.0 MB). Ninth internal seminar for doctoral students of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin 2007, pp. 86-109.
• Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3
• Marcel Bois: Thälmann's opponent: Hugo Urbahns in the early Hamburg KPD. In: Yearbook for Historical Communism Research 2016, pp. 217–233 ( online ).
• Rüdiger Zimmermann : The Lenin League. Left communists in the Weimar Republic (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties 62). Droste, Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-7700-5096-7 (also: Darmstadt, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 1976).

Web links

• Literature by and about Hugo Urbahns in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Hugo Urbahns in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Hugo Urbahns in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 4 (reprinted 2010).