Kurt Granzow

Kurt Erich Granzow (born May 7, 1909 in Berlin ; † September 10, 1943 there ) was a German KPD functionary . He belonged to the military-political apparatus of the KPD (M-Apparat), whose leadership he briefly held in Germany in 1933/34. Then he worked in the emigration for the defense of the KPD.

Live and act

The son of a toolmaker learned the goldsmith's trade, joined the KJVD in 1925 and the KPD in 1929, for which he temporarily managed secret weapons stores. From November 1932 to May 1933 he stayed in Moscow , where he completed a training course at the Comintern Military Political School in Moscow from January to April 1933 . Michael Kazmierczak and Rudolf Schwarz , Heinrich Reichel , Alfred Kowalke and Gerhard Holzer were other participants in this course, who smuggled through Prague to Berlin in the course of the summer and autumn of 1933 and were mainly used within the framework of the KPD's M apparatus . Granzow was illegally active in Berlin from July 1933 under the code name "Eugen". He organized secret quarters and post offices and investigated arrests. After Rudolf Schwarz's arrest, Granzow took over the leadership of the KPD's defense organization and organized the murder of Alfred Kattner, who had been "turned around" by the Gestapo, by Hans Schwarz . He and Hans Schwarz had started planning for this at the end of 1933 on behalf of Rudolf Schwarz.

After the murder in February 1934 Granzow fled to Prague and in March 1934 to Paris, where he worked for the Red Aid . In October 1934 he went to Saarbrücken , then to Prague , where he was briefly detained by the Czech police, and finally to Zurich , where he headed the defense of the KPD until the end of 1935. During this time, Granzow repeatedly traveled to Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main with a false passport to check statements made by emigrants. From 1936 to 1938 he headed the defense of the KPD in Copenhagen and negotiated in Sweden and Norway about the possibilities that KPD refugees could receive asylum there . He was finally arrested in 1938 and deported to Paris. From here Granzow went to Spain to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War . The German Reich granted him citizenship in 1939.

From February 1939 Granzow was interned in the Gurs and Le Vernet camps in France and transferred to El Djelfa in Algeria in November 1941 . From there he was first taken to the Castres prison in southern France on October 14, 1942 , and extradited to Germany by the authorities of Vichy France together with Willi Bürger at the end of November 1942. Hans Schwarz had been arrested in Slovakia in 1942 and the Gestapo had used his confession to extradite Granzov. On August 19, 1943, Granzow was sentenced to death by the People's Court for the murder of Kattner as a "dishonor" and executed on September 10, 1943 in Plötzensee .

Granzow used the code names Niels Larsen, Felix, Bert van der Laan and Rudolf Karaseck.

literature

• Granzow, Kurt . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 . ( online ).
• Institute for Contemporary History and Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933 . Vol. 1, KGSaur, Munich 1980, p. 240.