Persecution of communists

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Persecution of communists is a phenomenon that has been around since the emergence of communist ideas. In the first half of the 20th century, communists were persecuted particularly systematically and brutally by the Nazi and other fascist regimes and in the course of the Stalinist purges . After the Second World War, communists were persecuted in connection with the Cold War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In the FRG there was persecution due to the KPD ban and professional bans .

history

With the rise of capitalism and the wage labor class, the first modern communist thinkers became targets of persecution. A communist trial against Wilhelm Weitling took place in German-speaking countries in 1843 . In the course of the failed revolutions of 1848, many democrats, socialists and communists were persecuted. The socialist laws of 1870 or the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 and subsequent repression are examples of persecution.

After the October Revolution

The anti-communism and derived therefrom, tracking of actual and alleged communists by the First World War and the November Revolution changed significantly 1917th Anti-communism now got an anti-Bolshevik orientation. One example is the Red Fear in the USA, in the course of which the Palmer Raids took place.

The anti-militarist and Marxist KPD secession from the German Social Democrats and insurgent workers were bloodily suppressed towards the end of the First World War by an alliance of anti-Bolshevik social democracy and the military, leading figures like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered. Anti-Bolshevik white terror developed not only in Russia. Even though the KPD was able to develop into a mass party in the Weimar Republic , a widespread anti-Bolshevik climate emerged in society. An anti-Semitic anti-Bolshevism then developed in German fascism . Hitler called for an "extermination of Marxism stump and stem" and the "overcoming of communist disintegration of Germany" was formulated as the national goal. With the fire in the Reichstag , for which the National Socialists wrongly blamed the communists, all groups that were suspected of possibly supporting persecuted communists came under surveillance. Anti-Bolshevism and the persecution of communists were also central motifs in the Spanish Civil War and Austrofascism . Fascist anti-communism culminated in the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany, Japan and Italy.

Japan also pursued decidedly anti-communist policies in China. In China itself, the Chinese Kuomintang leadership broke the united front with the CCP in 1927 and started persecution with terrorist means and "extermination campaigns". The Japanese occupiers intensified this plan in the following time.

After the Second World War

After the Second World War , the struggle against Bolshevism by the capitalist countries took place primarily in the form of the Cold War . In terms of foreign policy, this went hand in hand with the international fight against (supposed) communist tendencies ( proxy wars ).

In the USA

Internally, the struggle against communism found its radical expression in McCarthyism . Suspects of communism in the US were summoned to appear before a committee on "un-American" activities. Thomas Mann was called an advocate of Stalin , and Bertolt Brecht and Albert Einstein were also summoned. The latter stated that this was a “type of inquisition” that “violates the spirit of the constitution” by placing “all intellectual efforts in public [...] under suspicion” and “all those” in the name of external danger who are unwilling to submit, to remove themselves from their positions, that is, to starve them ”. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were eventually even executed for espionage.

In the Federal Republic

Communists, the Nazi judiciary were victims between 1933 and 1945, was in Germany with the Federal Compensation Act of 1956 (or 1953) subsequently the Nazi victim status and the associated compensation disallowed. Konrad Adenauer said in 1954 that if Germany did not withstand all communist pressure, there would be “no more holding back: then the communist flood would flood all of Europe”.

In the political struggle against communism, the Federal Republic also relied on criminal law methods: it reintroduced old criminal offenses from the time of the Weimar Republic and even National Socialism, which the occupying powers had repealed after the Second World War. In particular, the 1st Criminal Law Amendment Act (1st StÄG) of August 30, 1951 fixed the criminal provisions of Part Two of the Criminal Code (StGB) on high treason, endangering the state and treason. After that, the convicts were given long prison terms. Politically, the newly created law was directed exclusively against communists and their supporters, sympathizers and contact persons. The aim was to capture the non-violent resistance as completely as possible, which could have threatened the policy of the federal government and the establishment of preventive measures to protect the state and its free democratic basic order (FDGO) from communist activities. As an innovation, the 1st StÄG introduced the state endangerment offense, which defines a form of nonviolent political activity without objectively determining a factual endangerment of the state.

The act of a perpetrator became a threat to the state as soon as it was influenced by an organization classified as anti-constitutional. This meant that actions that were not punishable in themselves, such as the distribution of leaflets against the remilitarization of the Federal Republic, could be punished. The authors of the 1st StÄG of 1951 had created a criminal law of convictions in which the objective investigation of criminal offenses increasingly faded into the background. On the other hand, the subjective assessment of the individual cases by the prosecutors and judges involved played an increasingly important role in the case law against communists.

German anti-communism reached its climax with the ban on the KPD as an anti- constitutional organization by the Federal Constitutional Court on August 17, 1956. This ban is so far the only one of a communist party within a Western European democracy after the Second World War. In the opinion of the historian Josef Foschepoth , who was able to view files released on the KPD ban in mid-2016, the Federal Constitutional Court was by no means the independent authority in the early years as it is perceived today. At that time there was much more pressure on the judges than was previously known, especially on the issue of the KPD ban.

Between 1954 and 1962 at least 85 people (in Wolfenbüttel prison) were imprisoned for political reasons; Between April and May 1961, an average of three to four political inmates can be identified for Wolfenbüttel. In December 1962 the last political prisoner was released.

In 1972 the radical decree was introduced and applied.

In Indonesia

In the mid-1960s, depending on the estimate, between 500,000 and 3 million alleged communists were killed in Indonesia. The perpetrators are still officially revered as folk heroes today.

The occasion was an attempted coup by a previously unknown “ September 30th Movement ” within the Indonesian army, in which six leading generals were murdered. This attempted coup was blamed on the PKI, the third largest communist party in the world with 3.5 million members at the time. Shortly afterwards, the army and paramilitary units began the pogrom that they themselves called "Musim Parang" (season of the cleaver). After actions in Jakarta , the military initially turned to Central Java (from where parts of the coup plotters came), where civilians, some of them from Islamic organizations, classified locally as anti-communist , were employed by the military to support them. Personal feuds were also settled and local tensions between population groups erupted. The greatest wave of violence ended at the end of 1965, but it continued in more distant regions, for example in Lombok in early 1966 and in West Kalimantan in October / November 1967 and, for example, in eastern Java until 1968.

There was no significant resistance from the victims or the Communist Party.

The surviving members of the party and their sympathizers were sent to prisons or concentration camps and had to do forced labor. After their release, they were stigmatized with the letters "ET" (Ex-Tapol, Ex-political prisoner) in their passports and discriminated against by denying civil rights and professional bans .

After the revolutions in 1989

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Victims of the US communist hatred during the Cold War: 60 years ago Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death for espionage , Deutschlandradio Kultur , April 5, 2011
  2. ↑ Norbert Frei: The practice of reparation. Wallstein Verlag GmbH, 2009, ISBN 978-3-835-30168-9 , pp. 203 ff.
  3. ↑ 1954-05-10 Article Neue Zeitung :: Konrad Adenauer. Retrieved March 22, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Dominik Rigoll: '' Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland. From denazification to defense against extremists, '' in: Norbert Frei (ed.): `` Contributions to the history of the 20th century 13, '' Göttingen 2013, p. 106.
  5. ^ Sarah Langwald: Communist persecution and legal resistance: the "Defense Committee Movement" and the "Main Committee for Referendum" , in: Work - Movement - History , Issue I / 2018, pp. 92-109
  6. ↑ Reinhard Höntsch: `` Kratological considerations on the interaction of ordinary violence and system opposition violence. '' Osnabrück 1999, p. 109.
  7. ↑ Lukkas Busche: Communist persecution in the former West Germany. April 29, 2016. Retrieved March 25, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Federal archive releases files on the KPD ban: “Constitutional judges were politically instrumentalized” Josef Foschepoth in conversation with André Hatting, Deutschlandradio Kultur, August 17, 2016
  9. ↑ Massacre: 500,000 Died in Indonesia's Killing Fields , Die Welt , December 28, 2013