Leo Zuckermann

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Leo Zuckermann (born June 12, 1908 in Lublin , Congress Poland ; † November 14, 1985 in Mexico City ) was a German lawyer and SED functionary. In 1952 he fled the GDR .

Life

Leo Zuckermann grew up as the son of a Jewish merchant family in Elberfeld . In 1924 he became a member of the SAJ . After graduating from high school in 1927, he began studying law in Bonn and Berlin . There he was active among left-wing socialist and communist students and in the management of the Kostufra . First a member of the SPD , he converted to the KPD in 1928 . His doctorate as Dr. jur. took place in 1931.

In 1932 he began a traineeship at the Wuppertal public prosecutor's office. In March 1933 he emigrated to France, where he worked under the name Leo Lambert at the "Defense Committee for the Defendants in the Reichstag Fire Trial " and later also secretary at the World Committee against War and Fascism . When war broke out in 1939, Zuckermann was interned. In June 1940 he managed to escape to Marseille, which was not yet occupied by the Wehrmacht , and in October 1941 he emigrated to Mexico . Here Zuckermann was one of the leading German communists under Paul Merker , was a member of the Free Germany movement and the Heinrich Heine Club . He edited the journals Democratic Post and Alemania Libre .

In July 1947 he returned to Germany in the Soviet zone of occupation (SBZ) and became a consultant in the local politics department in the Central Secretariat of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). In 1948, together with Paul Merker, he introduced a bill to the Politburo that provided for collective redress for the Jewish victims of the Nazis. The reparation law failed because of the anti-Zionist course of the SED leadership. From April 1949, as head of the foreign policy commission of the SED party executive, Zuckermann was an employee of Merkers and Walter Ulbricht . From 1948 to 1950 he was a member of the 1st and 2nd People's Council of the Soviet Zone and the Provisional People's Chamber of the GDR . From October 1949 he was State Secretary and head of the presidential chancellery of the President of the GDR , Wilhelm Pieck . He was a co-author of the constitution of the GDR .

At the end of 1950 Zuckermann was dismissed because of his emigration to the west and his close acquaintance with Paul Merker ; but remained a foreign policy employee of the Central Committee of the SED and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In November 1952 he was appointed director of the Institute for Law at the Academy for State and Law in Potsdam-Babelsberg. After the Slansky trial in Prague and the corresponding decision of the SED Central Committee of December 20, 1952, defamed as a "Zionist agent", the instrument of the proceedings being the Central Party Control Commission , Zuckermann fled to West Berlin in mid-December 1952 , later to France and went back to Mexico. Most recently, he owned a bookstore and a record company and taught as a sociology professor at the University of Mexico City.

He never saw his brother, the cardiologist Rudolf Zuckermann , with whom he had emigrated to Mexico in 1941 and who had gone to the GDR around the same time as his escape from the GDR.

Translations

  • JD Bernal , Maurice Cornforth: Science in the struggle for peace and socialism. Translated from English by Leo Zuckermann. Dietz, Berlin 1950, DNB 450405982 .
  • James Stewart Allen: World Monopoly and Peace. Translated from English by Leo Zuckermann. Dietz, Berlin 1951, DNB 450051293 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Leo Zuckermann  - Collection of Images

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-8347
personal data
SURNAME Zuckermann, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lambert, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and SED functionary
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Lublin , Poland
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 1985
Place of death Mexico city