Karl Viktorovich Pauker

Karl Wiktorowitsch Pauker ( Russian Карл Викторович Паукер ; * January 1893 in Lviv ; † 14 August 1937 in Moscow ) was an officer of the NKVD and headed the bodyguard of Josef Stalin until his execution .

Life

Karl Pauker came from a Jewish family from the Galician capital Lemberg , which at that time still belonged to Austria-Hungary . He worked as a hairdresser at the Budapest Opera . During the First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army . In 1916 he was taken prisoner by Russia and voluntarily stayed in Russia after the October Revolution , where he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 . Pauker entered the service of the Cheka and became a servant of Vyacheslav Menschinsky and, in 1924, as head of the Kremlin bodyguard, Stalin's personal bodyguard. From 1923 to 1934 he was chairman of the OGPU sports association Dynamo. From 1930 to 1934 he served as the head of the operational department of the Central State Security Administration in the Interior Ministry of the USSR .

After he had initially participated in the Great Purges himself and was promoted to "Commissar of State Security 2nd Rank", Pauker was denounced under torture by the former NKVD chief Jagoda . Since Pauker “knew too much and lived too well”, Stalin lost confidence in his security chief and had him arrested on April 15, 1937. He was sentenced to death on August 14, 1937 and shot on the same day.

Pauker was not rehabilitated even after Stalin's death.

literature

• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century. Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 , p. 342.

Web links

• Biography of Paukers on hrono.ru (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Simon Sebag Montefiore : Stalin. At the court of the Red Tsar . 2nd edition, Frankfurt 2007, p. 82.
2. ↑ Simon Sebag Montefiore: Stalin. At the court of the Red Tsar . 2nd edition, Frankfurt 2007, p. 252.