Porter

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As Porter ( porteurs de valises ) in France those predominantly French are intellectuals referred that during the Algerian war in France the activities of the National Liberation Front of Algeria ( Front de libération national , FLN) supported. The term luggage carrier is derived from what is probably the most important illegal support for the FLN in mainland France: the transport of money and false papers in suitcases. Based on this French model, networks to support the FLN were set up in Germany in the late 1950s.

Francis Jeanson and the Réseau Jeanson

Francis Jeanson (born July 7, 1922 in Bordeaux , † August 1, 2009 in Ares ) was a French philosopher who belonged to the circle of friends around Jean-Paul Sartre and from 1951 to 1956 headed the magazine Les Temps Modernes . In 1955 Jeanson and his wife at the time brought out the anti-colonial font L'Algérie hors-la-loi (Algeria outlawed), which led them to side with the FLN. On October 2, 1957, a meeting took place in the Jeansons house, which is considered to be the birth of the Jeanson network . Those present, friends of the Jeansons from the communist, Christian and socialist milieu, wanted to arrange for the transport and accommodation of FLN fighters as well as transport weapons, propaganda material and money.

The group's activities provoked fierce opposition in France. While its members pretended to want to save the values ​​of a republican France, which had been betrayed by the colonial system, they were accused in the National Assembly by the MP Jean-Marie Le Pen of running the business of enemy secret services. In February 1960 the network was dissolved; on September 5, 1960, six Algerians and eighteen French are charged. Francis Jeanson was able to withdraw beforehand, but was sentenced to ten years in prison in absentia. Until his amnesty in 1966, he lived underground.

On September 6, 1960, one day after the opening of the trial against the members of the Jeanson network , the manifesto appeared under the title “Déclaration sur le droit à l'insoumission dans la guerre d'Algérie” (Declaration on the right to refuse service in the Algerian War) the 121 , in which intellectuals, university members and artists expressed their solidarity with the defendants. Some of them were then dismissed from public and state employment, and charges were brought against others. During the process, the term porter was also coined for the members of the Jeanson network . It goes back to a letter of solidarity that Satres had read out during the hearing. Mourad Oussedik reported on how it came about :

“Sartre was summoned to the Jeanson trial. It was so that at the time he was in Brazil in Belo horizonte. He let us know that he had shingles. We tried to solve the problem, we met, my colleagues Benabdallah, Dumas, Vergès and I and Péju, then the secretary of Sartre who published the magazine "le temps moderne". We drafted a letter together, the letter was read over the phone to Sarte, who was still in Belo horizonte. He accepted the wording, we brought the letter to the trial and read it out loud, and that caused a tremendous sensation because the now famous phrase "I would be carrying the suitcase if you asked me" was in this letter. The whole thing resulted in an indictment of Sartre. "

- Mourad Oussedik : quoted from Ute Bönnen and Gerald Endres: The Algerian War: Fight on many fronts

The beginnings of German solidarity in Algeria

In West Germany, too, a solidarity movement for Algeria developed, whose various actors were grouped under the term pannier porters . In contrast to France, the term luggage carrier in Germany did not stand for a specific network, but rather for a large number of people and groups who supported the Algerian independence movement largely independently of one another. This support has been developing since the late 1950s.

“The actors, mostly less prominent» anti-heroes «, I call the Algerian generation, although they actually don't belong to one age group, but come from different life and time histories. There are those "old men" who, even before the Nazi terror, made left-wing politics and resisted it. Then came the 1920s who had been robbed of their youth by the Nazis, the generation of the Scholl siblings, so to speak, and finally the boys who [...] had to work as pioneers of the West German left in difficult restoration times. [..] What " Spain " was to the older ones , "Algeria" was to them - a prehistoric layer of the protest movement of the 1960s. For most of them, Algeria was not the main venue, but a continuation of the first West German peace movement by other means, a needle with which one could prick the calcifying social democracy a little, and the score with which one could listen to the pathetic organ sound of the prescribed German- French reconciliation was able to mix in a few anti-colonial tones. "

- Claus Leggewie : porter. The Algeria Project of the Left in Adenauer Germany , pp. 9-10

According to Leggewie, this “pathetic organ tone of the prescribed Franco-German reconciliation”, which did not tolerate any criticism of French politics, was due to the Franco-German relationship in the early post-war years.

“We know today that the French foreign politicians were planning a political horse trade with Bonn: they offered recognition of German sovereignty rights and demanded tacit or active support in the colonial war. Such a joint existed at the political level. On the other hand, the German supporters of Algeria made a different junction [...]: They discovered the "other France", that of the anti-colonial protest and the porters, out of the tradition of the "other Germany", that is, from anti-fascism and the struggle against the restoration. "

- Claus Leggewie : porter. The Algeria Project of the Left in Adenauer Germany, pp. 38–39

It belongs to the irony of history that the Federal Republic was nevertheless able to become a relatively safe haven for many members of the FLN and that the latter maintained a quasi-embassy in Bad Godesberg . The FLN “was granted de facto political asylum because of an informal political arrangement between far-sighted circles of West German foreign policy, co-opted social democratic opposition politicians and its semi-official diplomatic representation; the FLN acknowledged this with extensive political good behavior and respected the West German demand to keep political terrorism out of the Federal Republic. "

The offensive launched by the FLN on November 1, 1954 is considered the start of the Algerian War of Independence. For a long time, however, it was hardly or largely per-French perceived by the German public. Exceptions: Gert von Paczensky , the head of foreign affairs for the world at the time , and Bernt Engelmann , reporter for Spiegel . It was only with the French atomic bomb tests in the Sahara that the Algerian war came more into the focus of a critical public.

“The anti-nuclear movement and the Algeria protest belong together in terms of time and content: in the history of the political awakening of the younger generation, they appear like a twin protest. Anyone who had not noticed by then that a brutal colonial war had been fought "down there" since November 1954, the French atomic bomb tests in the Sahara in 1959 made the connection obvious. "

- Claus Leggewie : porter. The Algeria Project of the Left in Adenauer Germany, p. 14

Leggewie refers to an article in the magazine Das Argument from November 1959, in which the French nuclear tests were first discussed. As a result, the commitment to support Algerian independence has grown steadily, which Leggewie initially refers to the political activities in the academic milieu. In the same month, Si Mustapha-Müller had already published an article in Spiegel magazine in which Si Mustapha-Müller reported on the work of the foreign legionnaire 's repatriation service , which he directed and whose task it was to call foreign legionaries to desert in Algeria and to bring them back to their home countries. This was preceded by a first press conference by Si Mustapha-Müller in the FRG on September 14, 1959, and Klaus Vack even dates the beginning of the activities in support of the Algerian Liberation War by some regional associations of the Friends of Nature in Germany (NFJD) to the year 1958. Their climax reached the solidarity actions for Algerian independence then in the early 1960s and ebbed in 1962 after the treaties of Évian , which marked the end of the Algerian war, from. They played an important role in the development of internationalism in the West German left, even though “compared to the Vietnam generation [...] the porters were a small radical minority”.

Actors and Actions

The aforementioned support for the Foreign Legionnaires' repatriation service was certainly one of the most spectacular and powerful actions of Algerian solidarity. But there were also a large number of individuals and church, trade union and political groups who were committed to Algerian independence in the Federal Republic. According to Leggewie, their “services” were based on the pattern of the French porters and extended to
“- the provision of apartments and storage rooms for short-term stays by wanted and fugitive people, for secret meetings and the storage of propaganda material and papers,
- legal procurement or falsification of personal documents and other papers, printing and distribution of pamphlets, brochures, etc.,
- courier services, d. H. Transport of wanted or endangered persons, also across borders,
- informing the press and the public, influencing and informing a potentially sympathetic group of liberal, Christian and left-wing personalities and 'opinion makers', arranging official contacts with state and party organs, connections to left parties and organizations. "

Derived from these services , Leggewie differentiates among West German supporters between propagandists, activists and brigadists. Among the propagandists he counts the von Paczensky and Engelmann already mentioned, but also Volker Schlöndorff , who admitted himself to have been a porter . His debut film from 1960, Who cares? , received no approval from the Voluntary Self-Control of the Film Industry (FSK) . “The film was not released, out of political consideration for a friendly nation whose just war in Algeria it is not up to the Federal Republic to criticize. I couldn't have dreamed of more praise than this official ban. The otherwise unimportant little film [..] got an unexpected meaning. "

Some other protagonists of Algerian solidarity are briefly presented below.

From GDR refugee to FLN activist

Ulrich Kusserow, who fled the GDR at the age of fifteen in 1954 and later officially took the first name Mourad, met Si Mustapha-Müller in Berlin in December of the same year and stayed in contact with him in the following years. He described himself as a "dead mailbox" that had repeatedly received and sent press material from Tetouan. In June 1958 he received a letter from Tetouan , the headquarters of the repatriation service , in which he was asked to be ready for a direct assignment in France or North Africa. This initially failed due to the lack of a passport, but after completing basic training with the Bundeswehr, he was able to meet Si Mustapha-Müller and other FLN representatives in Cologne in March 1959. At the end of the year Kusserow set out for Tetouan, where he worked for the repatriation service until 1962 . After the end of the war of liberation he moved to Algeria, but only returned to Morocco a few months later. "The new Algeria, which was ideologically oriented towards the Eastern Bloc, could not offer me, the politically recognized GDR refugee, a home."

In the repatriation service , Kusserow was mainly responsible for German correspondence and had deep insights into the West German porter scene, which he also provided with a circular, the newsletter of the repatriation service for deserted foreign legionnaires .

Kusserow also referred to a West German delegation that visited the repatriation service in Tetouan in October 1960 . It included the trade unionists Helmut Neukirch, Josef Rosenthal from DGB Offenbach am Main and Werner Freisewinkel from IG Metall in Bochum. They were accompanied by the correspondent for the Frankfurter Rundschau , Roland Oertel, who, as Kusserow explained elsewhere, was in close contact with Si Mustapha-Müller.

Kusserow explicitly acknowledged the “fight of the Algerians against foreign rule”, which had to be supported, but for him, who converted to Islam himself, the “inner fire of resistance and the struggle against colonialism” was fed by Islam. With this view, he not only came into conflict with Si Mustapha-Müller, but also clearly distinguished himself from almost all luggage carriers in his book, published in 2002 .

“They viewed the world through the glasses of the East-West antagonism and enjoyed their role as international brigadists, as socialist avant-garde in the global struggle against capitalism and imperialism. Islam and the Algerians were of little interest to these porters. Central European ignorance and arrogance had built an ideological wall in their heads that the Algerians instinctively sensed. The FLN people, however, were ready to make deals with the devil themselves if it seemed to serve the Algerian cause. The German politicians, trade unionists and members of parliament, who showed sympathy for the Algerian liberation struggle, ultimately saw their commitment as a unique opportunity to distinguish themselves, and some knew how to fill their pockets on the side. "

- Mourad Kuserow : Flaneur between Orient and Occident , p. 42

The 1960 Algeria Exhibition

In West Berlin , Reimar Lenz had started collecting material on the Algerian war. A group of supporters soon formed around him, including Wolfgang Fritz Haug , which was set up in November 1960 as an Algeria project . Together they prepared an exhibition, through which the atrocities of the Algerian war in particular should be brought into the public eye. “The motive of this work was by no means to break the loyalty of the Adenauerstate, but an exaggerated human rights standpoint against the crimes of torture in the Algerian war. The exhibition mentioned facts and figures that the press had kept silent: 3 million disappeared (killed, refugees and displaced persons), systematic torture by the colonial troops. The methods of the partisans should not be presented uncritically either. The small group of Berlin students did not feel they were allies of the FLN. At the Algeria exhibition, Reimar Lenz thought of more than just politics, which he was accused of being apolitical as early as 1959, when he was one of the organizers of the "First Student Congress against Nuclear Armament" in Berlin. "Leggewie does not count Lenz as one of the" right porters ”, rather to an early human rights activist, but the exhibition gained attention beyond West Berlin. "In 1961" Algeria committees "were set up at universities in the FRG and carried on the traveling exhibition about the war. She came from West Berlin to Göttingen, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Munich, Braunschweig, Kiel and Villingen. The Algerian war was a focus of left-wing intellectuals at the time. ”Numerous celebrities gave the opening speeches at the respective exhibition locations - Jochen Steffen , then a member of the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag , in Kiel; the writers Carl Amery in Munich and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Frankfurt as well as the historian Richard Nürnberger and the theologian Ernst Wolf in Göttingen - and the protection of the constitution was always present.

Two activities that Wolfgang Kraushaar pointed out also fit into this student-intellectual environment . In 1977 he reported on a demonstration that took place in Marburg on November 5, 1960, at which Arab and German students demonstrated together against the French colonial war in Algeria. He reported a similar action on April 5, 1961: “ SDS members protest in front of the Maison de France in Berlin against the French colonial war in Algeria. Five leaflet distributors are temporarily arrested. "

The logistician couple Gorlas

Johannes and Gertrud Gorlas traveled to Paris as a newlywed couple on Easter 1955 and met friends and trade unionists there. They got caught in a police raid against FLN sympathizers, and Johannes Gorlas was beaten by the police himself while he was photographing the event. This was a "key experience: two porters were born".

Soon after their return from France, the Gorlas made the acquaintance of an FLN man, which meant that their Essen apartment quickly became an important point of contact for FLN people. The Gorlas offered overnight accommodation and made their cellar available as a depot. With the money from the FLN they bought a Mercedes that was used by the FLN people for courier trips until it had to be abolished again because of their frequent violations of the traffic regulations . In addition, the Gorlas couple repeatedly organized debates on the Algerian problem among friends and colleagues, bringing together a left-wing clientele of trade unionists, social democrats and socialists.

Werner Plum, the man behind the scenes

In the catalog of the German National Library one comes across an extensive list of publications by the sociologist and economist Werner Plum (born January 25, 1925 in Duisburg ). Many of his early publications deal with North Africa and Algeria, including the title Algerian Contemporary Poetry from 1959. Leggewie cites some biographical information from this, which Plum gave about himself on the cover of the book. “I was born in Duisburg on January 25, 1925, and survived elementary school, high school and military service. I spent the war years in Berlin, flying airplanes and talking to deported French workers. Immediately after the end of the war, I prepared the first Franco-German workers' meeting with the other people. I worked in Parisian and southern French companies, studied sociology and economic history, traveled to the east, but more often to the south, where I went fishing on the island of Stromboli and - since the outbreak of the colonial wars - toured the Maghrebian countries. "Plum was not Fighter pilot, but together with his co-pilot Günter Mittag Flieger in the meteorological service of the Wehrmacht, a position that gave him a lot of freedom. In the 1950s he came into contact with North African workers, and through worker priests he met FLN people among them. This is probably the result of the article he published in 1957 on North Africans in France , which dealt with their social situation and their role as an industrial reserve army.

Since 1956 Plum has acted as a mediator between Algerian intellectuals and freedom fighters and German politicians, including courier services. Leggewie regards it as one of Plum's greatest achievements that he was the first to familiarize Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, who was to become one of the most central figures among the luggage carriers , with the Algerian cause.

In addition to Wischnewski, Plum brought Algerians into contact with other important people within the SPD, such as Willi Eichler and Peter Blachstein . Leggewie also sees Plum as one of the masterminds - alongside Blachstein, Wischnewski and Jockel Fuchs - for a more decisive pro-Algeria decision at the SPD party congress in 1958. “First, a 'balanced' proposal from the party executive, introduced by party chairman Erich Ollenhauer , should be approved in which the SFIO was moderately ruffed, but the FLN was also made responsible for the escalation of violence. After fierce controversy, this resolution was rejected by the majority of the party congress and, by omitting the passage relating to the FLN, it was sharpened and radicalized. "

Werner Plum worked at the UNESCO Institute for Pedagogy in Hamburg from 1959 to 1961 , from 1961 to 1964 on study trips to North Africa and then from 1966 to 1987 as a research associate at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation .

The "Hessian underground" and the Algerian struggle for freedom

“A picture like from a gangster film by Jean-Pierre Melville : A rainy winter night, drops and light reflections on the windshield, the windshield wipers work tirelessly. A mid-range limousine crosses the eastern outskirts of Paris in sparse traffic, rolls via Chalons-sur-Marne and Metz on the Route Nationale towards the German border. ”What was described here in an effective way was not a film. On that February night in 1961, the Frankfurt sociology student Walmot Falkenberg (married Möller-Falkenberg, * 1940 - † January 16, 2017) together with a companion illegally brought a group of Algerian and French women across the German-French border near Forbach (Moselle) . Four of the women were French members of the Jeanson network , two were FLN activists. They had been in the Petite Roquette women's prison in Paris since the year before and were able to escape from there at the beginning of 1961. After the police checks had subsided, they were then brought to Germany in a rental car rented in Frankfurt.

This trip in February 1961 was not the only one that Walmot Falkenberg had undertaken in support of the FLN. She belonged to a conspiratorial Frankfurt porter group that Jacques Vignes, a childhood friend of Francis Jeanson's, had built up after the Jeanson network was broken up in Frankfurt.

“The older couple also belonged to the group, [..] they repeatedly took in overnight guests for a short time, brought by Walmot Falkenberg, among others. Another accommodation option was offered by a secretary who worked at the IG Metall headquarters and who had noticed Walmot Falkenberg during a temporary job; she lived with a former concentration camp prisoner and belonged to the " Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime " (VVN). "

- Claus Leggewie : Kofferträger (book) , p. 64

Walmot Falkenberg was also the chairman of the Frankfurt group of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), whose federal board had called for solidarity actions for Algeria as early as 1959 and 1960, but found no real acceptance and no allies. For Human Rights Day on December 10, 1961, she wrote a leaflet which she and three or four SDS comrades distributed in the pre-Christmas shopping hustle and bustle. “The whole action went completely into anti-communism. The people stopped and insulted us: Go into the zone, don't give a damn, you polluters, they probably forgot to gass you! It really went on for hours, and I know that in the end I almost cried. "

Leggewie described Walmot Falkenberg, who had already completed an eight-month study trip to the USA and got to know new forms of action of the civil rights movement ( sit-ins ), as the key figure in the Frankfurt support scene, who also formed the hinge “between the students, mostly from the SDS , and the young workers from the " falcon " group in which she tried to be a speaker ”. But Falkenberg, whose mother Erdmuthe was the head of the State Youth Welfare Office in Hesse , also found support in the family circle : Her aunt (her mother's sister) was Helga Einsele , the head of the women's prison in Frankfurt-Preungesheim at the time , and she was home to deserters from France and FLN- Algerians shelter.

For Walmot Falkenberg, the courier journeys between Germany and France ended in the spring of 1962. Heidelberg porters had been arrested by German border officials when they were crossing the border; Falkenberg, who was in another vehicle, escaped, but her papers were in the secured car. This led the police to visit her shortly afterwards, not to arrest her but to warn her about the Red Hand . Shortly afterwards the Algerian declaration of independence took place, and with that the activities of the porters were already done. The South Hesse organized a victory celebration in a Wiesbaden hotel together with FLN activists. Walmot Falkenberg continued to play an important role within the SDS and, together with Heiner Halberstadt , another Frankfurt porter , was one of the co-founders of the Frankfurt Club Voltaire . Halberstadt and the Frankfurter Falken had previously taken care of quarters for French deserters who had deserted from France or the French barracks in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg and smuggled them on to Northern Germany or the Scandinavian countries. The first congress of the Jeune Réssistance (Young Resistance), founded by French deserters, took place in a Falken home near Darmstadt in 1960 .

There is no evidence of any cross-connections between the Frankfurt porters and other FLN supporters in southern Hesse, such as the publisher Hans A. Nikel , who, according to SPIEGEL, “helped French deserters during the Algerian war to find shelter in nature lovers' houses in Taunus”. However, there is evidence that, for example, IG Metall , based in Frankfurt am Main, established contacts between the FLN and potential local supporters. Fritz Amann describes this for the Hessian Naturefriends Youth : “Through the contacts with the youth union, we also got an insight into the activities of IG Metall in support of the Algerian liberation organization. And when many Algerians fled Paris to Frankfurt at the end of the 1950s because of the atrocities committed by the Red Hand, we as Naturefriends Youth were also able to make a small contribution. "The Naturefriends House in Neu-Isenburg could be made available for overnight accommodation because it was relative inconspicuous when a large group of young people stayed in such an institution. But their further support was also provided. “Through contacts with the administration of the Frankfurter Rundschau , the possibility emerged that the young Algerians, as far as they were physically able to do so, found a job sorting the newspaper bundles at night and were paid for it, even if they had no working papers. That helped us a lot to ensure their livelihood. ”Similar to Walmot Falkenberg and her aunt Helga Einsele, the Hessian Naturefriends youth helped escape French deserters, as Klaus Vack reported:“ Others and I picked up deserters and brought them to a safe place , in my case mainly Finland. "

There were also personal and organizational cross connections between the Hessian Naturefriends Youth and the Association of Conscientious Objectors (VK) . Fritz Amann, who was active in both associations, reports on how money from the UK could also be used to support Algeria activities.

One of the main support of the Hessian Naturfreundejugend for Algerian independence was their commitment to of Si Mustapha-Müller built

For this, Fritz Amann, Horst Goßfelder and Klaus Vack were rewarded by Si Mustapha-Müller in 1961 with an invitation to the Moroccan-Algerian border area. Klaus Vack received another honor : in France he was "sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment in absentia, but given amnesty in 1967".

Algeria solidarity in the spirit of Trotsky

One of the most important and earliest German porters was Georg Jungclas , who had lived in Cologne since 1950 . He was an important figure in the Fourth International and the senior of a Cologne group that was composed primarily of young workers ( workers' youth cartel ). This group also included - in addition to his wife Leni, whose hat salon was the innocuous contact point for a wide variety of activists - the later SDS chairman and union official Helmut Schauer , Heinz "Micky" Beinert , Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski and Jungclas' father-in-law, the Cologne resistance fighter and from 1958 SPD city councilor Willy Pertz .

The most important and spectacular actions of the group were:

  • On May 1, 1958, they made their first demonstrative appearance with an FLN flag sewn by Leni Jungclas and a banner with the words "Freedom for Algeria". It was one of the first public, pro-Algerian expressions of sympathy nationwide.
  • Between September 1958 and April / May 1962 they published an information service, which appeared under the name Free Algeria (FA) in a total of 23 editions and contained largely translated articles from Algerian or French sources. The circulation of the individual issues fluctuated between 3,000 and 6,000 copies and had an important function for multipliers and sympathizers in left-wing SPD and trade union circles.
  • On November 26, 1958, they drove through Bad Kreuznach in a VW Beetle adorned with an FLN flag , where a meeting between Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle took place. Before they were arrested, they managed to distribute pro-Algerian leaflets to the international press. After the intervention of Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, they were released from the subsequent brief detention.
  • On November 1, 1959, the fifth anniversary of the start of the Algerian uprising, about twenty comrades laid a wreath in Cologne in memory of the victims of French colonial rule in Algeria. Hans Pfeiffer , who was involved in the operation and wanted to give a speech, was arrested and taken away by plainclothes police officers, but was released a few hours later.
  • At the instigation of Michel Raptis , Georg Jungclas went to Frankfurt in February 1960. Together with Raptis, he withdrew 200 million old Francs (over one million DM) from a branch of Deutsche Bank . The money was intended to finance the work of the FLN in Germany. The mistrust of the bank employees in the face of such an unusual cash withdrawal was great, but Jungclas and Raptis were able to leave the bank unmolested with a suitcase full of money.
    Wischnewski was also involved in a similar transaction, to whom his Algerian friends from Paris transferred 1.8 million to his private account, from where he withdrew it and let it flow into the German channels of the FLN.

Counterfeit money for Algeria

If the monetary transactions were already delicate actions in themselves, the risk increased when trying to produce counterfeit money and bring it into circulation. The model for this was the Bernhard Aktion , with which the Nazis attempted between 1942 and 1945 to forge and distribute English banknotes in order to provoke economic chaos in England.

What the Nazis had failed, the FLN now wanted to do better in order to weaken France. The IV International under Michel Raptis was commissioned to implement the plan . At the beginning of 1960 he succeeded in setting up a functioning counterfeiting workshop in Osnabrück. "Two Dutch lithographers and one casual worker from Osnabrück worked in it, who knew each other from shared experience of political resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands," and they did a great job: In April 1960 they produced prototypes that were later described by experts as excellent flowers. However, there was never any real production and delivery.

“The entire company [flew] with a parallel arrest operation by West German and Dutch criminal police - presumably because the Trotskyist organization was penetrated by agents of the Dutch secret service and the operation had been observed for a long time. First of all, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office wanted to initiate political proceedings because of secret bundling (§ 129 StGB) in order to emphasize the responsibility of the FLN and its Bad Godesberg “embassy”; but it was in fact not verifiably inaugurated into the project, so that in Osnabrück only one regional court case for counterfeiting (§ 146 STGB) remained. The defense, especially Dieter Posser from the law firm of the then lawyer Gustav Heinemann , enforced relatively mild prison sentences for the defendants. In Amsterdam, on the other hand, there was a trial of Michel Raptis and his Trotskyist comrades that was openly political in nature and received great international attention. With the counterfeit of less than one percent of the money in circulation, the project would certainly not have had the hoped-for success if it had been implemented; but it is one of the largest cases of political counterfeiting in monetary history. "

- Claus Leggewie : Kofferträger (article) , p. 178

Arms for Algeria

Of the many previously mentioned actions in support of the FLN, most of them are likely to have only caused a few remorse for those involved. But some of the activists came from pacifist organizations or belonged to the conscientious objectors' association, and for them the question of violence was a difficult problem - both in terms of violence carried out by the FLN as well as in terms of direct support for military actions through the procurement and manufacture of weapons.

“I had deep problems with the question of violence. I was involved in a war as a pacifist through what I was doing. But I tried to calm my conscience by luring away the Foreign Legionnaires, that is, by asking them to desert, and thus helping to save their lives and weaken the French war capacities and thus shorten the war. Strictly speaking, of course, it was window dressing, and back then we had arguments about this subject that lasted long nights. But there were no insoluble conflicts because there were hardly any supporters who said: 'We support the war and the heroism of the freedom fighters'. We knew how great the French minority's terror was against the Algerian people. We couldn't go over here from Germany and say: Let yourself be suppressed further, let yourself be slaughtered further, do not defend yourself. We just had to accept that the people of Algeria had no other option but to go the way they went.
We in the affluent republic could not go and say that the people there should be slaughtered like calves in a slaughterhouse. "

- Klaus Vack : quoted from Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel: Hoch die Internationale Solidarität , p. 88

These doubts also plagued Kurt Henker from Stuttgart , who had just turned 21 in 1960 , a recognized conscientious objector who had already proven himself as the owner of a courier vehicle (a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL ) purchased with FLN funds . At the turn of 1960/61 he went to Morocco to work in the arms production of the FLN.

The Trotskyists, Georg Jungclas in the lead, were already helping with the procurement of spare parts and accessories for weapons production and then went one step further. Because the French colonial power had succeeded better and better in preventing the supply of weapons for the FNL, the latter planned to intensify its own weapons production in the Moroccan hinterland and asked Michael Raptis again for help. Together with Georg Jungclas, he organized the mobilization of volunteers from the membership and from the environment of the IV. International to enable this weapon production at several locations in Morocco. The arms factories were mostly camouflaged as orchards, and the foreign brigadists from Argentina, Venezuela, France, the Netherlands, Greece, England and Germany, recruited by Raptis and Co., worked in them together with Algerian workers and guards of the Algerian National Liberation Army who had been brought back from Algeria ( ALN), including the young socialist Kurt Henker and the aforementioned Hans Pfeifer.

Georg Jungclas was not only the organizer of these brigadists, who resided in distant Germany, but also took part in direct help in setting up arms production. When traveling to Morocco, he carried parts and raw materials in his hand luggage. But when production ran almost smoothly in mid-1961, it was no longer of decisive importance for the war, and the armistice between Algeria and France was imminent. According to Legewie, however, these arms factories had a propaganda effect through which the Algerian leadership was able to show its own population and the fighters of the ALN that independence cannot be denied to a people who are capable of such an achievement.

However, it was not just Trotskyist circles who looked after the ALN with weapons. Another German was important for the Algerian arms production mentioned above, who came from a leftist milieu, but was a KPD member until he was kicked out in 1959 :

The trained mining engineer, friends with the Gorlas couple (see above), joined the ALN in 1959 at the age of 52 and became one of their weapons experts. Under the name Dejoul , he stayed in Algeria as a pied rouge after independence to help build the country. As head of a planning department in the state mining company SONAREM, he campaigned for the industrialization of Algeria.

As mentioned, despite all efforts and the support of foreign brigadists, Algerian arms production was not efficient enough to meet the ALN's arms needs. It was therefore dependent on the support of professional arms dealers - in addition to deliveries of arms, especially from Eastern Bloc countries , and the most prominent of these was Georg Puchert.

The former cigarette smuggler had already supplied the Moroccan independence movement with weapons and then did the same for the ALN. Leggewie considers him to be a “sympathizer of the Algerian war of liberation”, but he probably did not fit into the scheme of politically motivated porters . However, Puchert paid a high price for his work: On March 3, 1959, he was blown up in his car by a car bomb in Frankfurt's Guiollettstrasse; he had become a victim of the Red Hand controlled by the French secret service .

Result and benefits of Algeria solidarity

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity with which the porters carried out their commitment to Algerian independence. The motives, however, were very different. Klaus Vack speaks of the fact that for many “dealing with international issues was an escape from the realities in their own country”. What is meant by this is that based on the insight that a revolutionary change in German society was not imminent, the revolutionary hopes were simply exported, then to Algeria, and later to Vietnam . This attitude seems to have been most pronounced in Trotskyist circles, as is shown by the statement made by Helmut Wendler, who belongs to the Cologne circle around Georg Jungclas ( Schorsch ):

“For us, the Algerian liberation struggle was the topic at all. Compared to later movements, this was of course small and tiny. But for our time it was like the Vietnam movement afterwards in the sixties. It was worst at the end of the 1950s. Schorsch often said that in the very bad times of anti-communism, when class struggles in general stagnated after the Communist Party ban, and in some cases even receded, and at the union level little happened, Schorsch said, and I think so even retrospectively, it is still correct that we kept ourselves politically afloat for a long time with these internationalist questions, and that is also true. Algeria and the revolutionary process there were important questions for us that were right at the center. With an orientation only to the fighting here in the FRG it would have been very difficult, especially between 57/58 and 60/61. There was really nothing going on here. "

- Helmut Wendler : quoted from Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 123

Kurt Henker, who was involved in the Algerian arms production in Morocco, also appreciates the effect of his engagements “nil - maybe not nil if you consider that the Social Democrats were forced to deal with something like that, but our work now has really didn't have the effects we had imagined ”. This negative finding is not least due to the internal Algerian developments. After the military coup of 1965 at the latest, in which Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown and Houari Boumedienne came to power, the time of self-government socialism was over and many West German leftists had to bury their hopes.

“Of course we had hopes, and then in Algeria it didn't go as we wanted it to. Algeria was free, but then Ben Bella fell. Everyone had identified with Ben Bella's politics, with the approaches of grassroots democracy, and I felt the same way. After that I was flabbergasted for months. [..] I still remember how we read the FLN program, the ideas about socialism and the utopias about the emancipation of women. But the people who stood for these goals for us were suddenly out of the window. That created a shock that meant that nobody wanted to deal with Algeria any more. "

- Klaus Vack : Today the Algerian embassy invites you to vacation in the villa , in: Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel: Hoch die Internationale Solidarität , p. 91

Leggewie's résumé is less pessimistic. He also states that the Algeria issue was ticked off for some of the former porters . Others, however, used the skills acquired in Algeria solidarity to continue their political work - in ministerial offices as well as in the APO . And even if the porters were a small radical minority compared to the later Vietnam generation : "Internationalism continued, only really started."

literature

  • Claus Leggewie: porter. The Algeria Project of the Left in Adenauer-Germany , Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88022-286-X (quoted as: Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) ).
  • Claus Leggewie: Luggage carrier: The Algeria project in the 50s and 60s and the origins of "internationalism" in the Federal Republic , in: Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Vol. 25, No. 2 (June 1984), pp. 169–187 (cited as: Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (essay) ).
  • Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel: Cheer up international solidarity. On the history of the Third World movement in the Federal Republic , Kölner Volksblatt Verlag, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-923243-21-9 . The book contains a detailed chapter on Algerian solidarity.
  • Klaus Vack: The Algeria Solidarity of the Friends of Nature Youth , in: Wulf Erdmann / Jochen Zimmer (Hrsg.): Hundred Years of Struggle for Nature - History of Friends of Nature , Essen 1991, ISBN 978-3-88474-114-6 , P. 104 ff.
  • Klaus Vack: The other Germany after 1945 - as a pacifist, socialist and radical democrat in the Federal Republic of Germany. Political-biographical sketches and articles , edited by Wolf-Dieter Narr, Roland Roth, Martin Singe and Dirk Vogelskamp, ​​Committee for Fundamental Rights and Democracy, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-88906-116-4 .
  • Fritz Keller : A life on the edge of probability. Si Mustapha alias Winfried Müller: From Wehrmacht deserter to hero of the Algerian liberation struggle , Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85476-544-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Catherine Simon: Francis Jeanson
  2. ↑ Arnaud Folch: Guerre d'Algérie: le temps des “porteurs de valises” , Valeurs Actuelles, October 23, 2019
  3. ^ Benjamin Stora: Francis Jeanson, un intellectuel engagé '' , in: Histoire colonial et postcolonial, August 14, 2009
  4. ↑ Leggewie says differently: “On a November day 1960 the network was blown in the Lyon area.” (Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 9) At that time, however, the process was already running.
  5. ↑ So far there is only one article about Mourad Oussedik in the French WIKIPEDIA: fr: Mourad Oussediek
  6. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 43 ff.
  7. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (article) , p. 184
  8. ↑ Algeria. If you desert, you have to call Alemani - The escape from the Foreign Legion. In: Der Spiegel 36/1959 of September 2, 1959
  9. ↑ Klaus Polkehn: The Mission of Si Mustapha - a German fights for Algeria , in: Wolfgang Schwanitz (Ed.): Germany and the Middle East in the Cold War , Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-86583-144-3 , p 40
  10. ↑ Klaus Vack: The Algeria Solidarity of the Friends of Nature Youth, p. 104
  11. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 203
  12. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (article) , pp. 171–172
  13. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (article) , p. 172
  14. ↑ Interview with Volker Schlöndorff: "I was a porter" , Süddeutsche.de, September 10, 2007
  15. ↑ Volker Schlöndorff works: "Who cares"
  16. ^ Mourad Kusserow: biography
  17. ^ Mourad Kusserow: Flaneur between Orient and Occident , Verlag Donata Kinzelbach, Mainz 2002, ISBN 3-927069-59-0 , p. 67
  18. ^ He is the former chairman of the DGB district of Dortmund (* September 21, 1926; † April 4, 2010). ( Reception of the DGB NRW on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Helmut Neukirch )
  19. ↑ Mourad Kusserow: Flaneur between Orient and Occident , p. 111
  20. ^ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 28-29
  21. ^ A b Peter Mosler: Internationalism of the early sixties: Algeria
  22. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 32
  23. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 29–30
  24. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar: Notes on a chronology of the student movement , in: Peter Mosler: What we wanted, what we became. Student revolt - ten years later , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1977, ISBN 3-499-14119-1 , pp. 253-254
  25. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 37
  26. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 53 ff.
  27. ↑ Literature by and about porters in the catalog of the German National Library
  28. ↑ Werner Plum, quoted from: Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 39
  29. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 39–40
  30. ^ Werner Plum: North Africans in France
  31. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 55–56
  32. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (article) , p. 176
  33. ^ Archives of social democracy: Werner Plum
  34. ↑ DER SPIEGEL: Honorary name "Ben Wisch" , August 27, 1984
  35. ^ The Seeheim-Jugenheim local association of Bündnis90 / Die GRÜNEN mourns Walmot Möller-Falkenberg
  36. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 59–60
  37. ↑ Walmot Falkenberg, quoted from Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 73
  38. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 74–75
  39. ^ Klaus Vack: The other Germany after 1945 , p. 37
  40. ^ High school Johanneum Lüneburg: Other prominent former Johanniter - Helga Einsele and Erdmuthe Falkenberg, née Hackmann
  41. ↑ Samuel Schirmbeck: How the Hessian underground supported the Algerian struggle for freedom
  42. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 78. A picture of this celebration with Walmot Falkenberg in the center of the picture is printed on page 203.
  43. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 79–80
  44. ↑ See the article in the French WIKIPEDIA: fr: Jeune Résistance (Guerre d'Algérie)
  45. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 85. Excerpts from the manifesto adopted at this congress are printed on the following pages.
  46. ↑ Christoph Gunkel: Pardon inventor Nikel: 'What an unspeakably narrow-minded time!'. , Der SPIEGEL, February 23, 2015
  47. ↑ a b c Fritz Amann: “What we did was not without risk”, interview, printed in: Connection (Ed.): Algeria: return service for deserters 1957–1962. Connection e. V., Offenbach am Main, 2011, pp. 6-11
  48. ^ Klaus Vack: The Other Germany after 1945 , p. 61
  49. ↑ Frank Bärmann: The Naturfreundejugend Offenbach and the Algerian return service for deserters , in: Connection (Ed.): Algeria: return service for deserters 1957–1962 , pp. 3–4
  50. ↑ Leggewie pays tribute to this with its chapter heading: Secret Meetings in the Hat Shop. Georg Jungclas - Trotskyists for the FLN , in: Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 104
  51. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 110–111
  52. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (article) , p. 173
  53. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 111-113
  54. ↑ a b Conversation with Hans Pfeiffer in SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung , No. 05/2018, and Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 113–115
  55. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , pp. 104-105
  56. ↑ Ute Bönnen and Gerald Endres: The Algerian War: Fight on many fronts
  57. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (article) , p. 178
  58. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 120 & Ute Bönnen and Gerald Endres: The Algerian War: Fight on many fronts
  59. ↑ See above all the chapter German guest workers for Morocco in: Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 118 ff.
  60. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 122
  61. ↑ This was the name given to people from the left spectrum who went to Algeria after independence in order to work locally for the reconstruction and development of the country; see the article in French WIKIPEDIA for : Pieds-rouges .
  62. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 128
  63. ↑ DEATH COMES IN THE POST , DER SPIEGEL, March 2, 1960
  64. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 181
  65. ↑ Christoph Albrecht-Heider: Murder of Georg Puchert. A death as a political issue , in: Frankfurter Rundschau from February 17, 2014
  66. ↑ quoted from Die Fluchtversuche. About hope and illusions , in: Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel: Hoch die Internationale Solidarität , p. 89
  67. ^ Fritz Bilz: Risen from the ruins. Start-up, consolidation, adjustment. The period from 1945 to 1960
  68. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 123
  69. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger (book) , p. 203