Jan Appel

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Jan Appel (pseudonyms Max Hempel , Jan Arndt , Jan Voss ) (* 1890 in Mecklenburg ; † May 4, 1985 in Maastricht , Netherlands ) was a German communist revolutionary during the November Revolution and the Spartakusbund . Later he was a member of the KPD , the KAPD and the group of international communists (GIK) .

Live and act

Appel was a shipbuilder by trade, and a seaman for a few years, and lived in Hamburg. In 1908 he joined the SPD . During the First World War he belonged to the Hamburg left-wing radicals around Fritz Wolffheim and Heinrich Laufenberg . During this time he was involved in organizing strikes, particularly the Hamburg armaments workers' strike . During the November Revolution in 1918 he was the chairman of the revolutionary stewards in Hamburg. The following year, Appel joined the KPD, as though 1919 Paul Levi his attack on the left-wing opposition, the so-called utopian - radical leftist faction within the Communist Party started, Appel solidarity with the excluded and came shortly after the KAPD at. There he represented, like Karl Schröder , Alexander Schwab , Bernhardt Reichenbach , Emil Sach , Adam Scharrer and August Wülfrath , the Berlin tendency , which propagated strongly centralist opinions. Since 1920 he was a leading member of the KAPD, which was rated as radical left and spontaneous. In this function, he and Franz Jung formed a delegation that traveled to Moscow to negotiate admission to the Comintern and the party program, which was largely made up of that of the KPD. Because of the Russian civil war , a direct trip was not possible, so the group for the hijacking of a ship, the fishing steamer Senator Schröder , was forced to get to Murmansk , which was only possible with the help of Hermann Knüfken , as he was on the ship Did service. In Moscow there were negotiations with Lenin and the ECCI about the admission of the KAPD into the Communist International . Although these negotiations failed, Appels companion Franz Jung - who also stayed in Russia - and possibly himself, was granted Russian citizenship.

After his return, Appel was politically active under the name Jan Arndt in Central Germany, including in the March fighting in Central Germany . In 1921 he was Max Hempel as a representative of the KAPD delegate of the III. World Congress of the Comintern. In 1923 he was sentenced to two years and one month in prison for political robberies and piracy . He was wanted since 1920 and could only be imprisoned because he committed a theft as Jan Arndt during the Ruhrkampf , which was based on a food shortage and was not politically motivated. While in detention, Appel devoted himself intensively to the study of Marxism .

After his release from prison in 1925, he went to the Netherlands in 1926 . There he worked as a dock worker and was politically active, among others, in the group of International Communists and the Dutch KAP , which he led with Henk Canne Meijer for a long time. He was involved in the collective publication Basic principles of communist production and distribution published in 1930 . After an extradition request from Germany, Appel went underground in 1933. During the Second World War he was active in the resistance and belonged to the organization Communistenbond Spartacus , but also continued to maintain his contacts in Germany. After 1945 he was the editor of “Spartacus”, a small weekly newspaper with socialist-utopian content. After the war, initially unreported, it was legalized in 1948, but at the same time prohibited from any political activity. In spite of this, he kept in contact with his comrades in the Communist Bond Spartacus .

literature

  • Olaf Ihlau : The Red Fighters. A contribution to the history of the labor movement in the Weimar Republic and in the “Third Reich” . Meisenheim am Glan 1969.
  • Hubert van den Berg: Jan Appel - a German councilor communist in exile and resistance in the Netherlands 1926–1948 . In: Anarchists Against Hitler. Anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, council communists in resistance and exile. Lukas, Berlin 2001.
  • Michael Kubina: About Utopia, Resistance and Cold War. Berlin 2001, p. 94 (preview) .
  • 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) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.mxks.de/files/kommunism/gik.VorwortUndDaten.html#2.1 .
  2. ↑ (PDF page 9) .
  3. ↑ http://www.isf-freiburg.org/verlag/leseproben/pdf/rieger-glueckstechnik_lp-einleitung.pdf (page 3)
  4. ^ Raimund Dehmlow: Companions: Otto Gross and Franz Jung. In: Dehmlow.de , July 10, 2015.
  5. ↑ Reading sample (PDF page 8) .
  6. ^ Hermann Knüfken , short biography of the German Resistance Memorial Center .
  7. ↑ a b Hubert van den Berg: Jan Appel - a German councilor communist in exile and resistance in the Netherlands 1926-1948 ( Memento of August 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). In: Kurasje.org , 2001 (excerpt from: Anarchists against Hitler. Anarchists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, Council Communists in Resistance and Exile. Lukas, Berlin 2001).
  8. ↑ http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0308/t570308.html (note 4)
personal data
SURNAME Appel, Jan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hempel, Max (alias); Arndt, Jan (alias); Voss, Jan (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician
DATE OF BIRTH 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Mecklenburg
DATE OF DEATH May 4th 1985
Place of death Maastricht