Karl Becker (politician, 1896)

Karl Becker (around 1930)

Karl Becker (born September 3, 1896 in Gülchen, Namslau district , † December 5, 1961 in Gelsenkirchen ) was a German blacksmith and politician (KPD).

Life

After attending primary school , Becker completed an apprenticeship as a blacksmith from 1911 to 1913 . Until 1915 he worked as a blacksmith's journeyman for master craftsmen in the country. He then took part in the First World War from 1915 to 1918 .

After the war, Becker took on a job as a blacksmith in the hard coal mine of those of Kulmiz in Dittersbach in Silesia (today Dzietrzychów / Podgórze ). Since April 1, 1923, he was a member of the works council . Active in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) since the early 1920s , Becker began to hold public offices for his party towards the end of the decade. From 1929 he was a member of the municipal council in Dittersbach for the KPD and from 1930 to 1933 he was a member of his party for constituency 7 (Breslau) in the Berlin Reichstag .

After 1933 Becker lived in exile in Czechoslovakia and later in Great Britain . He caused a stir there in 1944 with a political pamphlet in which he said that the Germans could refute the National Socialist propaganda thesis “Adolf Hitler is Germany” only by overthrowing the dictator on their own. If Hitler's power were not to be broken by the Germans themselves, but by the Allied invasion of Germany, then, according to Becker's argument, the defeat of National Socialism would amount to a “moral defeat” for the German nation. In this case, according to Becker, the Germans would have forfeited any right to claim that Germany and Hitler were not identical.

In 1946 he returned to Germany, where he became a member of the SPD and worked in the IG mining district of Gelsenkirchen.

literature

• 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

• Karl Becker in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Against Hitler. Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement Short biographies (PDF file; 873 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.territorial.de/ndschles/namslau/bankwitz.htm
2. ↑ Stephen Brockmann: German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour , p. 28. The original says: “The German People will have lost all right to say that the German People is not Hitler.”