Kurt Babel

Kurt Babel (born October 10, 1897 in Liegnitz , † February 20, 1968 in Prague ) was a Sudeten German political functionary (KSČ) .

Life and activity

After attending school, Babel became a railroad worker. In 1912 he joined the union. From 1915 or 1916 he took part in the First World War, in which he was taken prisoner by Russia. After his repatriation he became an active trade union official in northern Bohemia.

In 1925 Babel joined the KSČ, for which he became a functionary in Komotau . From 1929 to 1935 he was a member of the National Assembly of Czechoslovakia for his party .

From 1935 to 1938 Babel was district secretary of the KSČ in Teplitz-Schönau . In this position he supported German communist emigrants who had fled to Czechoslovakia.

After the annexation of the Sudeten areas to the German Reich , Babel emigrated to Great Britain in December 1938, where he became a member of the Beuer group . After the founding of the Sudeten German Committee ("Representation of the Democratic Germans from the ČSR") he became a member in 1943.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Babel as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1945 Babel returned to Czechoslovakia. There he became a member of the Central Committee of the KSČ and later in the Ústřední rada odborů , the Central Council of Trade Unions. His main tasks in the following period consisted in carrying out propaganda work among the Germans in Czechoslovakia.

From 1951 to 1962 Babel was the first editor-in-chief of the German-language trade union newspaper Aufbau und Frieden in Prague. He was finally dismissed from this post on the charge of having taken an opportunist stance against the KSC's promotion of the assimilation policy of the German minority in the early 1960s.

From 1957 Babel was a candidate and from 1959 a member of the Central Committee of the Svaz československých novinářů (Association of Czechoslovak Journalists).

literature

• Werner Röder / Herbert A. Strauss : Politics, Economy, Public Life , 1980, p. 29.
• Heinz Ruscher: "Kurt Babel - a true internationalist", in: Heinz Ruscher / Heinz Senenko: Antifascists are never forgotten: Biographical sketches of anti-fascist resistance fighters on both sides of the border and activists creating the foundations for the socialist rebuilding , 1987, p. 5– 10.