Karl Klein (party official)

Karl Klein (born December 7, 1886 in Erfurt , † April 14, 1960 ibid) was a German party official ( SPD / Spartakusbund / KPD / SED ), union official and manager of a wholesale company .

Life

Klein came from a working class family . His father was a shoe worker in a factory in Erfurt . In 1904 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1909 he took up a job as a clerk . In 1914 he was drafted as an army soldier in the First World War. In 1918 he got involved in the " movement of the revolutionary stewards " and came into contact with Spartacus activists, as a result of which he founded a local branch of the Spartacus League in Erfurt. Klein was Erfurt delegate at the founding party congress of the KPD and then became chairman of the KPD Thuringia in Erfurt. From 1920 he worked as the political leader of the KPD of East Prussia . In 1922 and 1923 he was secretary of the KPD in Bremen . In 1924 he became a member of the " Workers' Illustrierte Zeitung " (AIZ) within the Münzenberg -Konzerns.

After power was transferred to the NSDAP in 1933, he earned his living with advertising . In 1938 he was taken into custody , but was released in 1941 because of typhus disease and then lived in Langensalza .

After the liberation from National Socialism , he got involved in the rebuilding of a local KPD group in April 1945. From 1945 to 1947 he was chairman of the FDGB district board of Langensalza, then a speaker on the state and national board of the union. Most recently he was manager of a wholesale company in Erfurt.

Klein was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze.

literature

• Steffen Kachel : A red-red special path? Social Democrats and Communists in Thuringia 1919 to 1949 . Publications of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, Small Series Volume 29, p. 557.
• Reports by the party veterans Karl Reimann and Karl Klein, Annexes VII and VIII, in: Gutsche, Willibald, The revolutionary movement in Erfurt during the 1st imperialist world war and the November revolution, Erfurt 1963, pp. 214-217, and Schulze, Gerhard, Die November Revolution 1918 in Thuringia, Erfurt 1976, p. 149.
• Little, Karl . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .