Kurt Bürger (politician)

Kurt Bürger , actually Karl Wilhelm Ganz (born August 27, 1894 in Karlsruhe , † July 28, 1951 in Schwerin ) was a German politician and briefly Prime Minister of Mecklenburg . He used the pseudonyms Curt Bürger , Kurt Krüger or Lukas at times .

Life

As the son of a metalworker, he attended elementary schools in Karlsruhe, Bietigheim and Baden-Baden until 1908 . From 1908 to 1911 he trained as a locksmith and worked as a locksmith in Munich from 1911 to 1913 until he was called up for military service in 1914 .

From 1913 to 1914 he wandered through Germany. From 1914 to 1917 he did military service. In 1917 he was seriously wounded and dismissed as 50 percent unfit for military service.

In 1912, Bürger joined the Social Democratic Party and the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV). In 1916 in the hospital he made his first contacts with social democrats who were in opposition to the truce policy of the social democratic leadership. From 1917 to 1919 he worked as a locksmith in the ammunition factory Deckel in Munich, where he was elected member and later chairman of the works committee. He was also a member of the DMV district management in Munich.

In January 1918 he was one of the organizers of the arms workers' strike in Munich. In November 1918 he was a member of the workers' council in Munich. As an opponent of the policies of the Social Democratic leaders, he resigned from the SPD in December 1918. In early 1919 he was a co-founder of the KPD in Bavaria . In April / May 1919 he took part in the defense of a division of the Red Army of the Bavarian Soviet Republic as commander .

After the crackdown, he was from a state court to four years in prison convicted, he in solitary confinement in 1923 to Straubing prison was serving. He then worked as a locksmith in Munich until December 1923, was then dismissed for political and trade union activity and in early 1924 took over the management of the Munich sub-district of the illegal KPD. After several months of imprisonment in the Stadelheim correctional facility in 1924 for illegally continuing to work for the KPD, Bürger worked from 1924 to 1927 in the KPD's southern Bavarian district leadership. From 1927 to 1929 he worked initially as a trainee and later as a political editor at the Hamburger Volkszeitung .

In May 1928 the Reichsgericht sentenced him to one year imprisonment for anti-militarist activities among members of the Reichswehr and the police. He took part in the 12th party congress of the KPD in 1929. From 1929 to 1933 he worked in the apparatus of the Central Committee (ZK) of the KPD. After the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, Bürger initially headed the Central Committee's courier and liaison service and then worked under the pseudonym Lukas and Kurt Krüger as an instructor in the districts of Halle , Königsberg , Danzig and Stettin . In 1933 he was given the pseudonym Kurt Bürger, which he kept until his death.

In December 1933, Bürger emigrated to the Soviet Union by decision of the Central Committee of the KPD . Until 1934 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as deputy head of the organizational department for Central Europe. From 1934 to 1936 he worked in the Red Union International ( Profintern ) as deputy head of the press department and as an assistant to the general secretary. From 1936 to 1937 he took part in the Spanish Civil War as a commander in the staff of the International Brigade in Albacete .

He helped set up the Edgar André battalion, fought as political commissar of the battalion near Madrid and as commissar with the staff of the International Brigades in Albacete. He participated in the formation of the 13th International Brigade ( Dombrowski ). Seriously ill, he came to Paris in 1937 and returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. After his recovery he worked until 1939 as editor of the Deutsche Zeitung , which was published by the editorial staff of Pravda in Moscow .

Until 1941 he worked as a senior teacher at the Moscow Language Institute. From 1941 to 1945 he did educational work as an instructor in German prisoner-of-war camps.

In 1945, Bürger returned to Germany on May 6th with the group of representatives of the KPD Central Committee led by Gustav Sobottka . In December 1945 he became the state chairman of the KPD for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Mecklenburg and participated in the implementation of the land reform . He was one of the signatories of the resolution of the joint conference of the Central Committee of the KPD and the Central Committee of the SPD with representatives of the district (first sixties conference on December 20 / December 21, 1945).

Bürger took part in the 15th party congress of the KPD in 1946, the unification party convention of the KPD and SPD in 1946, as well as the II. Party congress in 1947, the 1st party conference in 1949 and the III. SED party conference in 1950. In 1946 he became a member of the party executive of the SED and chairman of the SED parliamentary group in the Mecklenburg state parliament . From 1946 to 1951 he was chairman of the state board (until 1948 together with Carl Moltmann ) and first secretary of the Mecklenburg state management.

From 1946, Bürger was a member of the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state parliament and chairman of the legal committee there. In 1949 he became a member of the Provisional People's Chamber and in 1950 a member of the National Council of the National Front . On July 19, 1951, Bürger was elected Prime Minister of the State of Mecklenburg to succeed Wilhelm Höcker . Just nine days later, he succumbed to the consequences of heart failure.

His grave is located in the Schwerin cemetery of the victims of fascism , where it forms the center of a grave field for 397 VdN members ( persecuted by the Nazi regime ) and their spouses in the center of the cemetery .

Citizens as namesake

On 20./21. September 1952 the Kurt-Bürger-Stadion was inaugurated in Wismar . There wearing FC Anker Wismar their home games. There was the Warnowwerft factory school in Warnemünde, which was called Kurt Bürger Betriebsschule , and there were also several general education schools in the GDR that bore his name, such as the "Kurt Bürger Oberschule" Reinkenhagen, in what is now the Vorpommern-Rügen district . In the Baltic Sea resort of Ahlbeck, an FDGB convalescent home was named after Kurt Bürger.

literature

• Bernd-Rainer Barth , Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Citizens, Kurt . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists . Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. Second, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag , Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

Commons : Kurt Bürger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Kurt Bürger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Kurt Bürger in the state bibliography MV