Kurt Bachmann

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Kurt Bachmann (born June 22, 1909 in Düren , † February 23, 1997 in Cologne ) was a German communist politician ( KPD , DKP ), activist and resistance fighter against National Socialism . From 1969 to 1973 he was chairman of the German Communist Party.

Life

The son of the commercial clerk and social democrat Max Bachmann and Elfriede Bachmann born. Klaber, was of Jewish origin and a trained tanner . As Bachmann told him, his father once said to him: “If you work overtime, you don't even have to come home. A worker earns a living in eight hours, and when it is not enough, he fights for more wages. "

In 1929 Bachmann became a member of the KPD- affiliated Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) , in 1932 a member of the KPD . 1933-35 he worked illegally for the KPD in Cologne and distributed leaflets. Together with Otto Kropp and Ulrich Osche , in 1935 he rebuilt the Cologne KPD district organization, which had been broken up several times by the Gestapo, and used his company car to collect and distribute illegal documents from the Neuss port. Kropp was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1937 without betraying Bachmann.

In 1938 Bachmann went to France for his company with his wife Alice, who was also Jewish, where he was interned after the outbreak of war in 1939. He was a member of the illegal KPD leadership in Toulouse. In 1940 he resisted an order that Walter Ulbricht had issued to voluntarily report to the Gestapo and have him brought to Germany. In the course of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , the KPD leadership in Moscow temporarily had the hope that the KPD would again be tolerated or even legalized in Nazi Germany.

In 1942 Bachmann was arrested and taken to Auschwitz with his wife Alice . Since he was able to work, he was separated from the others; his wife was murdered. Bachmann was an inmate of various concentration camps, most recently the Buchenwald concentration camp , where he rejoined the KPD.

In 1945 he became a license holder of the Volksstimme , the KPD organ in Cologne, was a co-founder of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN), 1949–56 as a close associate of Max Reimann's secretary in the KPD party executive and lecturer at party schools. In the course of Stalinist excesses, he also participated in defamation of his own comrades, u. a. by Fritz Sperling , whom he later regretted.

After the KPD ban in 1956 he worked as a reprograph, then as a Bonn correspondent for the anti-fascist weekly newspaper Die Tat . In the federal election in 1965 he ran for the German Peace Union . From 1967 he founded the German Communist Party (DKP), was party chairman from 1969–73, then until 1990 a member of the party executive committee and of the General Council of the Fédération Internationale des Résistants (FIR). In 1974 the Soviet Union awarded him the Order of Friendship of Peoples.

In the 1980s and 1990s Bachmann appeared in Cologne at numerous rallies by the peace movement , at rallies against xenophobia (" Arsch huh, Zäng ussenander ", 1992) and against right-wing events. He was also frequently questioned as a witness of the persecution in the Nazi regime. On such occasions he often turned against the equation of socialism and " National Socialism ". He himself never used the word "National Socialism", but always spoke of " fascism ". He justified it as follows: “But fascism spoke with two tongues. (…) On January 27, 1932, Hitler declared in front of the Industry Club in Düsseldorf: 'We have made the relentless decision to exterminate Marxism in Germany to the last root.' And then should National Socialism be a variant of socialism? "

Works

  • Kurt Bachmann (ed. And incorporated): 1933. Texts, photos, chronicle. Verlag Marxistische Blätter, Frankfurt / Main 1983, ISBN 3-88012-675-5 .
  • Kurt Bachmann: We have to be champions of human rights. Speeches and writings . Verlag Pahl Rugenstein successor, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-89144-268-8 .

literature

  • Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration, Munich 1980/83
  • NS Documentation Center Cologne (Ed.): Against the brown current. Cologne resistance fighters today in portraits of Arbeiterfotografie Cologne, Cologne 1991
  • Obituaries by Heinz Humbach, Heinz Stehr and Jens Jürgen Korff , Cologne 1997 (partly unpublished)

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Stadtarchiv Düren, signature: PDS / Open List Düren, information on Kurt Bachmann, January 15, 2004
  2. ↑ The Political Platform of the Central Committee of the KPD in Moscow on December 30, 1939 went in this direction. Detlev Peukert : The KPD in resistance ; Wuppertal 1980, p. 327f
  3. ↑ So z. B. in his work: 1933. Texts, photos, chronicle. Ed. U. a. v. K. Bachmann, Frankfurt / Main 1983
  4. ↑ Quoted from M. Demmer: champions of human rights. On the 100th birthday of the resistance fighter and VVN co-founder Kurt Bachmann ; June 27, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Bachmann, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German DKP chairman and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Düren
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1997
Place of death Cologne