Karl Bühren

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Robert Bühren (born August 5, 1888 in Elberfeld ; died July 4, 1938 in Butowo , Soviet Union ) was a German social democratic worker athlete and sports official.

Life

Willibald Krain : Cover for The Medicine Ball (1928)

Karl Bühren came from a simple background and grew up in the northern part of the Elberfeld region . His father worked as a dyer. He attended elementary school and trained as a saddler . He married Selma Bentlage; they had their son Karl Friedrich, born in 1912. Before the war, Bühren was elected full-time district functionary in the Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association (ATSB). In June 1915 he was drafted into the First World War until the end of the war in 1918 . In March 1919 he was again elected as district game warden and in 1921 at the ATSB Bundestag as the full-time 2nd federal gymnastics warden, in 1924 he became federal gymnastics warden for men's gymnastics and sport and finally in 1927 national sports warden. During this time, sport in the ATSB became more differentiated, in addition to gymnastics, team sports such as football and hockey and also athletics were included, which was also reflected in the training documents published by the Sports Association, a large part of which Bühren revised or rewritten himself. Bühren organized major sporting events at the ATSB, such as the 1st Workers' Olympics in Frankfurt am Main in 1925 . Bühren was a lecturer at the federal school of the Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association in Leipzig. Bühren was a member of the SPD . The workers' sports in the Weimar Republic was also affected by the split in the labor movement, organized in competition with the Social Democrats controlled ATSB KPD own workers sports groups.

After the transfer of power to the Nazis in 1933 the ATSB and its affiliates were banned or Nazi organizations into line . Bühren and his family had to flee to Czechoslovakia in May 1933 . He worked there for the "Workers 'Gymnastics and Sports Association in the Czechoslovak Republic" and became an employee of the international umbrella organization of the social democratic-oriented workers' sports associations Confédération Sportive Internationale du Travail (SASI). With other former ATSB officials, Bühren founded the “Combat Association for German Workers' Sport” in Aussig , which was supposed to overcome the political division, but he did not find recognition in the SASI for this. Bühren then approached the communist Red Sports International (RSI), which had been founded in 1921. On March 29, 1934, the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger published the second expatriation list of the German Reich , through which charges were expatriated . In June 1935 he emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he was able to work again as a sports lecturer in Moscow .

In view of the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union , Bühren tried in vain to travel to Sweden in May 1937. In March 1938, Bühren and his son Karl Friedrich, who had started studying sports in Moscow, were arrested. The allegation was that they had carried out espionage and had co-founded a group of the Hitler Youth in Moscow. Bühren and his son were executed in Butowo near Moscow in the summer of 1938 , their wives were lied to, saying that the men had been sentenced to ten years in the Gulag with no contact. The women and the grandchild were able to return to the German Reich in 1939 after the German-Soviet non-aggression pact .

Fonts (selection)

Karl Bühren: Body building gymnastics (1926)
  • Gymnastics on parallel bars . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1922
  • Body building gymnastics . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1924
  • Gymnastics on the horse . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1924
  • With P. Holzer: sports massage . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1926
  • with Waldemar Richter: The snowshoe run . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1926
  • The sports manager. A guide for athletic trainers . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1927
  • Exercise learning and assistance . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1928
  • The gymnastics officer . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1928
  • The medicine ball . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1928
  • Gymnastics . Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1930
  • What do I do? Arbeiter-Turnverlag, Leipzig 1931

literature

  • Eike Stiller: Karl Bühren, worker athlete between National Socialism and Stalinism . In: Diethelm Blecking , Lorenz Peiffer (ed.): Sportsmen in the "Century of the Camps". Profiteers, resistors and victims. Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2012, pp. 222–229
  • Eike Stiller: Karl Bühren - worker athlete and sports functionary . Nora, Berlin 2007
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933 . Volume 1: Politics, Economy, Public Life . Saur, Munich 1980, p. 103

Web links

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).
  2. ↑ Wladislaw Hedeler: Chronicle of the Moscow show trials in 1936, 1937 and 1938: planning, staging and effect . Akad.-Verlag, Berlin 2003, p. 413, p. 538
personal data
SURNAME Bühren, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bühren, Karl Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social democratic worker athlete and sports functionary
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Elberfeld
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1938
Place of death Butowo