Karl Baier (politician)

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Karl Baier, the "Red Sailor" (1914)

Karl Baier (born January 3, 1887 in Magdeburg , † April 12, 1973 in Berlin ) was a communist politician and resistance fighter .

Life

activist

Baier's mother was a nurse, his father a painter's assistant. From 1893 to 1901 he graduated from the middle school and then did an apprenticeship as a model carpenter until 1905. He worked in this profession for several years. In 1905 he joined the German Woodworkers' Association and in 1912 the SPD . In 1914 he was drafted into the Navy. As a sailor, he made contact with the Bremen left . From 1915 he organized revolutionary circles in Wilhelmshaven and from 1916 in Cuxhaven , in which Bremen's “workers' policy” and the Berlin “ Spartacus letters ” were discussed. On November 5, 1918, he led the sailors' uprising in Cuxhaven. As chairman of the workers 'and soldiers' council there , he was a member of the Navy Committee, represented it in the plenary assembly and on the executive council of the Berlin workers 'and soldiers' councils, and took part in the KPD's founding party as a guest on its behalf . In 1919 he was co-founder of the KPD in Magdeburg and its elected chairman there. In 1920 he acted for the party as secretary for Magdeburg-Anhalt. In 1921 he was elected as a member of the provincial Saxon state parliament. From April 1923 he worked for the party, first in Kassel , then in Gelsenkirchen , where he was imprisoned twice for several months. Then, from October 1925, he was employed by the Central Committee of Red Aid Germany (RHD) and in March 1927 took part in the second conference of International Red Aid (IRH) in Moscow. As the newly elected secretary of the IRH, Karl Baier reorganized its Central European office in Berlin.

Parties

When the “Stalinization” of the KPD began in 1928, he opposed the RGO policy and the social fascism thesis . Baier was expelled from the KPD in July 1929 and joined the KPD-O . At the same time he lost his offices in the RHD. He now earned his living as an employee in the Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg district office . As a member of the KPD-O he was in the management of the opposition International Aid Association (IHV) and the publishing cooperative “Arbeiterpresse”.

In the clashes within the KPD-O over the SAPD , he was one of the eight minority spokesmen who were expelled from the party in January 1932. In the SAPD he is a member of the Berlin district management.

resistance

From March 1933, Baier was active in the illegal SAPD Reich leadership. He and many other comrades were arrested on August 22, 1933 and brought to trial on December 5, 1934, in the so-called "Berlin SAPD Trial". The verdict was two and a half years in prison, which he had to spend in Plötzensee and Tegel . After his release, he opened a mail order business and was able to camouflage illegal contacts that reached through Jakob Schlör and Georg Dünninghaus to the resistance group led by Anton Saefkow . He organized the exchange of information, the collection of money and food stamps for Nazi opponents in hiding and Jewish families. In the last war and the first postwar weeks he lived in Fangschleuse in Erkner .

New beginning

In May 1945, Baier was appointed mayor of Fangschleuse or Werlsee near Erkner by the Soviet headquarters . In June 1945 he returned to Berlin. There he joined the KPD and took over the management of the special department (later main office) for refugees and returnees in the new magistrate. In 1948 the East Berlin magistrate entrusted him with the management of the main social office and in 1950 with the management of the newly established office for church questions. In 1951, in the course of the Stalinist party purges, he was removed from the state apparatus and expelled from the SED. In response to his protest and the intervention of party chairman Wilhelm Pieck , the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK) reversed the expulsion on April 18, 1952. From then on, however, he was denied political leadership positions. From 1952 he worked for the trade union publisher “ Tribüne ”, first as an archivist, and finally as a bookseller in what was then Stalinallee (today Karl-Marx-Allee). In February 1960 he retired, but remained active as chairman of the residential area committee of the National Front , as well as a member of the administrative board of the Prenzlauer Berg municipal housing administration . After the Khrushchev thaw, he was honored several times by the party and the state in the 1950s, most recently in 1971 the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold. He had a close personal and political friendship with Jacob Walcher since the KPD was founded.

Honors

  • 1971 Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold
  • October 7, 1978 Karl Baier was given the honorary name of the 9th TS-Boots-Brigade of the Sixth Flotilla of the People's Navy of the GDR

literature

  • Theodor Bergmann : Against the current. The history of the KPD (opposition) . Hamburg 2004 (therein: short biography of Karl Baiers, p. 404).
  • Karl Baier: Own experience report. In: In spite of all that! 40 years of the November Revolution 1918–58 . Ed .: Inst. F. Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee d. SED. Berlin (GDR) 1958. Forward and don't forget!
  • Ortwin Pelc : Karl Baier, sailor. In: Olaf Matthes / Ortwin Pelc: People in the Revolution. Hamburg portraits 1918/19. Husum Verlag, Husum 2018, ISBN 978-3-89876-947-1 , pp. 12-15.
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Karl Baier (politician, * 1837)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files