Leo Flieg

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Leo Flieg , actually Leopold Flieg (born November 8, 1893 in Berlin , † March 15, 1939 in Moscow ) was a German politician, founding member of the KPD and member of the state parliament in the Free State of Prussia . As part of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union , he was arrested in 1938 and executed in 1939.

Life

Flieg comes from a working class family in Berlin and completed an apprenticeship as a commercial clerk. In 1911 he became a member of the Central Association of Clerks and the SPD , he belonged to the political circle of friends of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg . During the First World War he was employed as a clerk in Berlin after being wounded. In October 1918 he was one of the founders of the Free Socialist Youth of Germany (FSJ). He joined the Spartacus group and has been a member of the KPD since it was founded. From November 1919 to March 1922 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International (KJI). Since 1922 he was (together with Käthe Pohl) Secretary of the organizational office of the headquarters of the KPD. In 1924 he was elected to the Prussian state parliament for the KPD , and was re-elected in the subsequent democratic elections in Prussia. From 1927 he was a member of the Central Committee of the KPD and from 1929 also a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KPD. He was released from these party functions in May 1932 after disputes over the party course (Flieg was considered a member of the "Neumann Group" around Heinz Neumann and Hermann Remmele ) and demoted to the position of candidate for the Politburo. Since 1928 he was a member of the International Control Commission of the Comintern .

In 1993, Der Spiegel wrote about Flieg's activities in the early 1930s: “Until 1932, Flieg was secretary of the KPD and representative of the Comintern Secret Service (OMS), which provided the KPD with annual subsidies of 1.8 million marks, false passports, radio operators and couriers. He himself ran a counterfeiting machine with 170 employees. This was done in close cooperation with the Soviet secret police. "

From the end of 1932 to the beginning of 1934, Flieg worked as an employee of the Executive Committee of the KI (EKKI) in Moscow. From 1934 he worked as an employee of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KPD in Saarbrücken , Prague and Paris . At the Brussels conference of the KPD in October 1935 he was re-elected to the Central Committee. In June 1937 he returned to Moscow, where he moved into the Hotel Lux . In 1937 he was expatriated from the Third Reich . After a denunciation by Herbert Wehner , Flieg was arrested by the NKVD on March 20, 1938 , accused of "espionage" and "membership in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization" and sentenced to death on March 14, 1939 by the Supreme Court of the USSR . In 1957 he was posthumously rehabilitated.

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fritjof Meyer on the intrigues of the communist Herbert Wehner in exile in Moscow
  2. ↑ Federal Archives, signature BArch, R 58/9679
  3. ↑ Communism - Sent to Death , in Focus : Issue 41 of October 7, 2002
personal data
SURNAME Fly, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Flieg, Leopold; Nowak
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD)
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1939
Place of death Moscow