Lothar Hofmann

Lothar Theodor Hofmann (born February 16, 1903 in Leipzig , † 1989 in Copenhagen ) was a German political functionary ( KPD ).

Life and activity

Hofmann was the son of a senior teacher. After attending grammar school and doing a bank apprenticeship, he settled in Hamburg in 1925 . Politically he was organized in the KPD since 1925.

From 1929 Hofmann worked in the commercial agency of the Soviet Union and at the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) in Hamburg. In 1930 he was accepted into the military apparatus of the KPD. In the following years he was engaged in the implementation of military espionage for the party and maintained connections with the Soviet intelligence service. In 1932 he was sentenced to four years in prison, but was released again as a result of the political amnesty of December 1932.

In 1933 Hofmann emigrated to Denmark . There he worked in frontier work from April 1933 to May 1934. This was followed by three months of defense work in Copenhagen before he went to Paris . From he was sent to Moscow for training by the head of the KPD intelligence service, Hans Kippenberger . Before that he had taken over the investigation of the Albert Fleischer case from the military as a special assignment.

From November 1934 to August 1935 Hofmann attended the M-School in Moscow (code name Willi Schumann). During this time he was also a guest at the VII World Congress of the Communist International . This was followed by participation in a transitional course at the Western University in Moscow. Hofmann then worked as a locksmith in a Moscow auto-tractor factory.

In 1937 Hofmann went to Spain, where he worked in the foreign department of the military intelligence service Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM). In May 1939 Hofmann was sent to Denmark by Franz Dahlem (code name Erich Langer). There he was a member of the close leadership of the KPD section leadership north under Kurt Adam .

After his emigration, Hofmann was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police: around 1938 his expatriation was announced in the Reichsanzeiger . In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, were to be located and arrested with special priority by the occupying forces following special SS units.

On May 19, 1941, he was arrested by the German occupation authorities and taken to the Reich. There he was sentenced to death on January 5, 1943. After July 1943, Hofmann became an informant for the Gestapo, mainly for the reconstruction of the Stapo Hamburg's personal and search files that had been destroyed in an air raid. In return for his cooperation, his death sentence was commuted to imprisonment.

On February 13, 1945 the execution of Hofmann's death sentence was ordered. The Hamburg Gestapo saved their informant, as did Paul Helms and Heinrich Wiatrek , from the great murder action of April 1945, during which seventy-one resistance fighters were executed in Neuengamme concentration camp by having the three of them handed over the day before. A few days later, due to the end of the war, he was released.

After the end of the Second World War, Hofmann reported to the KPD in Hamburg. However, he was no longer politically active, but worked in a medium-sized company in Horneburg until 1947. Then he went back to Copenhagen, where he worked in a travel agency.

literature

• Michael F. Scholz : Would you like some Scandinavian experience? Post-exile and re-migration. Steiner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-515-07651-4 , p. 358 and passim.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp: The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45: Register of places of birth and last places of residence , 1988, p. 165.
2. ^ Entry on Lothar Hofmann on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London). (engl.)