Klaus Weigle

Klaus Weigle (* 1926 in Danzig - Langfuhr ; † August 4, 2009 ) was a German journalist and politician ( KPD ). From 1950 to 1956 he served as the KPD state chairman, first in Schleswig-Holstein , then in Hesse and finally back in Schleswig-Holstein until the party was banned. He was expelled from the KPD, which was banned at the time, in 1958 because of “unreliability”.

Life

Weigle's father, a free-spirited liberal who had raised his son to be anti-fascist, was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1945 and was considered missing. His mother fled with his two siblings in the last days of the Second World War from Danzig to Lübeck , where the three of them lived in an assigned room. There she was visited for the first time on June 15, 1946 by her son, who had escaped from French captivity. At the time he lived and lived in Salzgitter-Lebenstedt , where an acquaintance who had also fled from captivity, despite the lack of a release certificate, had organized a police registration for him from the administration of the British occupation zone and also provided him with accommodation and work. In Salzgitter he worked as a worker in the dismantling of halls of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring . After moving to his mother's apartment, he joined the KPD on August 19, 1946, who had never been politically organized before. From November 1946 he was in Plön for three months , where he attended a three-month course in the castle for high school students who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht shortly before graduating from high school, and obtained his university entrance qualification. He turned down an offer from a friend to finance him to study architecture. His refusal and his intention to devote himself entirely to communist party work, he explained to his mother in a letter: “It seems to me that removing the rubble in the mind is more important than clearing the rubble on the streets and building new houses, so that we don't stumble over them into new disasters. "

After his return from Plön his active party work began in Lübeck. From June 1, 1947, on the instructions of the KPD district leadership, he took over the management of the three-person local editorial team of the North German Echo , the newspaper that was the KPD's newspaper in Schleswig-Holstein from April 1946 to August 1956. In this capacity he worked closely with the district leadership and took part in their meetings. In February 1947 Weigel was appointed to the main editorial office of the newspaper in Kiel . The secretariat of the KPD state leadership resided in the same house, which at that time was still under the leadership of the KPD district Wasserkierte (Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, north-west Lower Saxony). The district association Wasserkante was dissolved in 1948 in favor of separate state organizations. The KPD state organization Schleswig-Holstein was constituted at a delegate meeting in Rendsburg . At the behest of the central management department of the KPD, Weigle attended a three-month training course at the Wilhelm Florin School in Heidenoldendorf from October 1948 . There, the course participants learned of violent disputes in the party structures, in which the delimitation of real and supposed Titoists and (less often) Trotskyists was at issue. When he returned to Kiel from training, he found the staff of the Norddeutscher Echo had completely changed after the purges had taken place and was made deputy editor-in-chief.

Max Reimann entrusted Klaus Weigle with the management of the KPD in Schleswig-Holstein in 1950.

In March 1950, Weigle was called away from editorial work to the neighboring country office. There he who traveled told Kurt Müller , at the time still deputy in the Federal Republic (a few days later, he was the chairman of the party purges victim), with the party decided that he should take over the management of the national organization. A few days later Weigle had a conversation with Max Reimann , the chairman of the federal organization, in Frankfurt am Main , who repeated the request of his deputy, who had since been deposed. So the 24-year-old was elected state chairman by 161 delegates in Kiel on April 14, 1950. He subsequently admitted: “My steep career was connected with these purges. I and my kind were too young to have ever wavered or belonged to any parliamentary group, we were inexperienced and unencumbered by the shadows that lay on the party's history, we were at an age at which one can be enthusiastic and receptive to radical slogans and demands is. "

In the spring of 1952, Weigle was "transferred" from the party headquarters to Hesse, where he took over the management of the state organization because the entire state board had resigned as part of a "self-cleaning campaign". The party chairmanship in Kiel was taken over by his previous deputy and organization secretary, the old communist Hein Meyn , whom Weigle already knew from Lübeck. The district management Wasserkante Meyn had delegated there after the end of the war for the purpose of building up the party. He was a mentor for Weigle in his first years in the KPD . But already in late summer Meyn was relieved of his position during a hospital stay. The charge against him was, without further precision, that he had failed. After his recovery, Meyn was employed in Bremen as a KPD instructor . Weigle returned to Schleswig-Holstein in 1954, immediately took over the management of the state organization, was able to rehabilitate his former mentor and bring him back to his old posts as deputy and organizational secretary.

Weigle remained state chairman until the party was banned in 1956. He then took on conspiratorial tasks. In 1958 he lived underground and worked for an illegal KPD regional organization. When he failed because of a severe herniated disc and was unable to carry out his duties, the party leadership accused him of “violating the conspiratorial rules” and of “unreliability” and expelled him from the KPD. Unlike his old mentor Meyn , Weigle did not join the German Communist Party (DKP), which was founded in 1968 . But he enjoyed the confidence of many in the country and often spoke at the grave of deceased communists. In the following years he worked as a journalist.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information up to 1950 is based, unless otherwise indicated, on: Klaus Weigle, Vom Sturmgrenadier zum KPD-Landesvorsitzenden. An autobiographical sketch (1946/50) . Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 7, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holsteins e. V. , pp. 213–241, online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.
2. ^ Obituary for Klaus Weigle , Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holstein e. V., accessed on March 1, 2017.
3. ↑ Klaus Weigle: From Sturmgrenadier to KPD state chairman. An autobiographical sketch (1946/50) . Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 7, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holsteins e. V., pp. 213–241, here p. 217. Online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.
4. ↑ Jürgen Brammer / Kurt Schröder: North German Echo. Memories of a communist newspaper . Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 4, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holstein e. V., pp. 384–402, online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.
5. ↑ Klaus Weigle: Hein Meyn or A laborious and belated attempt as a result of major political changes to draft a funeral speech appropriate to the deceased and the time. Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 11, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holsteins e. V., pp. 213–280, here p. 250, online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.
6. ↑ Klaus Weigle: Hein Meyn or A laborious and belated attempt as a result of major political changes to draft a funeral speech appropriate to the deceased and the time . Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 11, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holsteins e. V., pp. 213–280, here p. 253, online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.
7. ↑ The illustration from 1952 is based, unless otherwise indicated, on: Klaus Weigle, Hein Meyn or An attempt, which is laborious and belated as a result of major political changes, to draft a funeral oration appropriate to the deceased and the time. Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 11, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holsteins e. V., pp. 213–280, here pp. 256 ff., Online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.
8. ^ Resignation of the regional executive committee of the Communist Party of Hesse, February 26, 1951. Contemporary history in Hesse. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
9. ↑ Uwe Danker , Detlef Siegfried : How do you mourn a communist? Marginal notes on Klaus Weigle's speech in the dead of Hein Meyn . Yearbook Democratic History , Volume 11, Advisory Board for History in the Society for Politics and History Schleswig-Holsteins e. V., pp. 209–212, online version (PDF), accessed on March 1, 2017.