Kurt Zierold (miner)

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Kurt Zierold (born November 5, 1902 in Zschocken ; † March 7, 1965 there ) was a German miner and communist. From 1948 to 1961 he headed the VEB Steinkohlenwerk Deutschland in Oelsnitz .

Life

Zierold was born in 1902 as the son of a bricklayer as one of five children in Zschocken, West Saxony. After elementary school he learned the trade of a wagon smith from 1917, in which he also worked afterwards. In 1920 Zierold became a member of the German Metal Workers Association (DMV) and was actively involved in so-called workers' sports as a swimmer, wrestler and weightlifter.

In 1921 he got a job as a blacksmith in the Hohndorfer coal mine United Field in the Lugau-Oelsnitz coal field . During the Kapp Putsch in 1923, Zierold was in the ranks of the Zwickau workers' armed forces. At the same time he worked as a youth shop steward for the German Metalworkers' Association. Following the inflationary period, Zierold was repeatedly unemployed, and at times he also worked in a drop forge in Aue . In 1926 he joined the Red Aid in Germany and was released from mining the following year.

After a phase of unemployment, Zierold found a job again in the area of ​​the hard coal plant Vereinsglück, which had also been part of the German trade union since 1906. Deterred by power struggles within the party, he did not join the KPD until 1929 , not least because his work environment was also a communist stronghold. In the same year he was entrusted with the management of the KPD local group in his home village.

After the National Socialist seizure of power, Zierold was taken into protective custody for some time. However, due to the lack of workers in the shafts, he was released some time later, but was subject to police surveillance. After being imprisoned again in 1935, Zierold began to work again as a pit smith in his mine in 1937. In 1944 he was arrested again as part of the grating action , and immediately released because he was hardly replaceable as a pit smith.

After the end of the war in 1945, Zierold took over union functions again, he was a member of the Saxon FDGB state executive committee and the central executive committee of IG Bergbau . As a result of the referendum in Saxony on June 30, 1946 , the plant management was dismissed and Zierold was promoted to the plant management as second chairman of the works council, as the works council actually ran the company for some time. His role as a leader is also underscored by the fact that, as a delegate to the Second Party Congress of the SED in 1947, he delivered a greeting from the German coal works.

On February 1, 1948, Zierold was officially appointed plant manager of the VEB Steinkohlenwerk Deutschland. When Adolf Hennecke drove his high-performance shift in the Karl-Liebknecht shaft at the neighboring local rival VEB Steinkohlenwerk "Karl-Liebknecht" on October 13, 1948 , Zierold and the miners Böhm, Hage and Dietzmann organized a high-performance shift at a depth of 1130 meters on October 22, 1948, which surpassed the well-known activist. According to Zierold, the impetus was not socialist tenets, but local mine patriotism. As a result, he developed the coal works into one of the pillars of the coal supply in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR. This also meant that Zierold was considered for the first nomination for the list of candidates for the newly created National Prize for Science and Technology as early as 1949. The nomination only came about after a remarkable article by Gustav Sobottka, then head of the coal headquarters, in New Germany under the heading Coal mining must be given greater consideration . In it he criticized vehemently and with rare openness that apart from Adolf Hennecke no other engineer or technician in the coal industry had been nominated for the national prize. The article was followed by an extensive list of suggestions with 26 people from the coal mining industry, 5 of whom were ultimately honored, but Zierold was not. *

Under Zierold's direction, coal was produced independently as VEB Steinkohlenwerk Deutschland until 1960. Despite the reclamation of already discarded shafts and the further expansion to up to 1200 m, which at that time represented a European depth record, the mine field proved to be less productive than expected. Thereupon the production was stopped in 1960 and in 1961 the VEB Steinkohlenwerk Deutschland with the VEB Steinkohlenwerk "Karl-Liebknecht" to VEB Steinkohlenwerk Oelsnitz / Erzgeb. merged. Zierold, already suffering from health problems at this time, retired. Until 1963 he was a member of the Central Committee of the SED, to which he was elected for the first time in 1954 at the Fourth Party Congress and confirmed in 1958 at the V Party Congress.

* Nevertheless, he is referred to as a national prize winner in various sources

Honors

Individual evidence

  1. ^ New Germany of September 23, 1947, p. 6.
  2. ^ New Germany of October 24, 1948, p. 2.
  3. ↑ Neues Deutschland, August 21, 1949, p. 5.
  4. ↑ Neues Deutschland from July 5, 1953, p. 3.
  5. ↑ Neue Zeit of July 1, 1956, p. 2.
  6. ↑ Neues Deutschland, October 6, 1962, p. 4.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Zierold, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German miner, member of the Central Committee of the SED
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Shock
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1965
Place of death Shock