Adolf Ende

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Adolf Ende (around 1928)

Adolf Ende , pseudonyms : Lex Ende , Lex Breuer (born April 6, 1899 in Bad Kissingen , Lower Franconia ; † January 15, 1951 in Hilbersdorf , Saxony ) was a German journalist , publicist and politician.

Life

The son of an art dealer became a soldier at the end of 1917 and took part in the First World War at the age of 18 and experienced the November Revolution as a member of the soldiers' council in Koblenz . After the war he became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1918 , but by 1919 a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Under the pseudonym Lex Breuer he was an editor of various party newspapers until 1928 .

From 1924 to 1928 he was a member of the KPD district leadership in the Ruhr area , then political director of the Lower Rhine district and from 1928 to 1930 a member of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic (4th electoral period).

Ende oriented himself within the KPD on the " Compromisers ", which in December 1928 brought him dismissals. After he broke with the "Compromisers" in 1929, he was again editor of the Rote Fahne and from 1930 of the "Illustrierte Roten Post". Illegal in Germany until 1934, he emigrated to the Saar region in 1935 and to Prague in 1936 . From 1937 he was editor of the Deutsche Volkszeitung in Paris . In 1939 he was interned in Le Vernet , after which he fled from the Wehrmacht to Marseille . There he fought in the Resistance in southern France and took part in the battles for the liberation of Marseille.

After the Franco-German armistice, an illegal leadership of the KPD in France was established in Toulouse in August 1940 . Ende worked for her as a representative for the Marseille area and as a person responsible for all emigration matters. The aim was to free German communists from the internment camps and enable them to leave France. In November 1941, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France (KPF) gave official approval for the establishment of the Western leadership of the KPD in Paris. Accordingly, the leading party members from the unoccupied southern France were ultimately summoned to northern France. This request followed u. a. Nor did it end, but he continued to try to find ways to leave the country for them overseas. Thereupon the Central Committee of the PCF forbade any further departure of Communists from France in April 1942, since these were "urgently needed for the fight in France" . Ende and other responsible persons did not follow this order either. As a result, Ende, who had been entrusted with the leadership of the KPD in southern France in May 1942, was relieved of his functions in August 1942 and, immediately after the end of the war, on behalf of the KPF, the KPD's western leadership opened a party expulsion procedure. He was accused of “sabotaging the work among German soldiers, slandering the French and German party leadership and disrupting German membership” . The investigative commission headed by Herbert Müller finally pleaded in July 1945 for Ende to be excluded from the party.

In September 1945, Ende returned to Germany from French exile and was accepted back into the KPD on April 17, 1946 in Berlin. From October 1945 to June 1946 he was editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Der Freie Bauer". In August 1946 he even became editor-in-chief of the SED central organ " New Germany " under the pseudonym Lex Ende . But in the course of the anti- Tito campaign, he was replaced as an emigrant from the West in June 1949 and then demoted to editor-in-chief of Friedenspost , the weekly newspaper of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship .

On August 24, 1950, in a statement by the Central Committee and the Central Party Control Commission of the SED in connection with the Stalinist show trials in Hungary against László Rajk and in Bulgaria against Trajtscho Kostow, he was accused of working with Noel Field and expelled from the SED with others. The same accusations were made against him as in his first party exclusion proceedings in June 1945, e.g. B. his support for the emigration of German communists from France overseas, even after the German attack on the Soviet Union .

Ende was not arrested like others, but was employed as an accountant at the Muldenhütten smelter . Ende died in January 1951. So he escaped his involvement in the next round of the Eastern European show trials. The SED only rehabilitated him on November 29, 1989.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. New Germany : About Us
  2. Angelika Timm writes: Prominent Jewish victim (s) of this campaign was (..) the editor-in-chief ... Lex Ende .... In: Hammer, Zirkel, Star of David. , Pp. 158f, citing Jerry E. Thompson: Jews, Zionism and Israel. The story of the jews in the German Democratic Republic since 1945. Ann Arbor 1978, book available in the Anne Frank Shoah Library in Leipzig