Manfred Stern

Manfred (Moses) Stern (also Emilio Kléber , Lazar Stern , Moishe Stern , Mark Zilbert ; * 1896 in Woloka near Chernivtsi ; † February 18, 1954 in the Sosnowka labor camp) was a communist , Comintern employee and agent of the Soviet military intelligence service , GRU . During the Spanish Civil War he was known as General Kleber . He died in the Gulag as a victim of the Great Terror .

Life

From Bukovina to the Far East

Manfred Stern was born in 1896 in a village near Chernivtsi in Bukovina, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy at the time, as one of four sons in a Jewish family. Two of his brothers, Wolf and Leo , later also became communists and held important positions in the GDR .

As a medical student in Vienna, Manfred Stern volunteered in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 . In 1916 he was captured by Russia and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia . There he joined a Bolshevik organization.

Through the October Revolution , Stern was released and joined the Red Army . On their behalf he was the Commissioner a guerrilla unit against the White Army under Kolchak .

In 1920/21 he fought as a brigade commander of the Red Army against the troops of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg in Mongolia . During this time he was also elected to the constituent assembly of the short-lived Far Eastern Republic .

After the civil war , Stern first studied in Moscow at the highest cadre school of the CPSU . In 1923 he was sent to Germany to work as a civil war specialist on behalf of the Comintern to help build the KPD's military-political apparatus (MP) . He acted in the rank of brigadier general under the code name Lazar Stern as a military advisor to the CP chief Albert Schreiner , to whom the MP district north-west was subordinate.

Erich Wollenberg attributes a crucial role to Stern in the origin of the Hamburg uprising . Instead of Kiel , which was initially intended for a Leninian “feel with the sword”, he suggested Hamburg. At this suggestion, the uprising began in Hamburg, Wollenberg said.

In 1924, when Stern had returned to Moscow, he was now studying at the Frunze Military Academy . After completing his studies, he became an employee of the GRU and taught KPD cadre on behalf of Ernst Thälmann .

In 1929, Stern was sent to New York and headed the illegal GRU residency there. He acted under the code name Mark Zilbert and built a network of sources and agents who dealt with the procurement of military secrets. Evidence of this was, for example, the theft of a tank prototype and its shipment to the Soviet Union.

In 1932, Stern traveled from New York to Shanghai , where he worked on behalf of the Comintern as a military advisor to the newly created Soviet Republic of China . For this he also learned Chinese. Among other things, he tried to forge an alliance between the Chinese Red Army and the troops of Chiang Kai-shek . The failure of this alliance was ultimately the trigger for the Long March . Stern then went back to Moscow in 1935 and worked briefly for Otto Kuusinen in the EKKI's secretariat .

In the Spanish Civil War

In September 1936, Stern, disguised as a Canadian citizen born in Austria, entered Spain under the name Emilio Kléber. One of Napoleon's generals , Jean-Baptiste Kléber, served as a model for his surname . He initially acted here on behalf of the Comintern as a military advisor to the Spanish Communist Party leadership. In October 1936 he became the military commander of the XI. International Brigade . He traveled to Moscow with André Marty in January 1937 after he had been removed from his command. After the death of General Lukacs , Stern took over his XII. Interbrigade . Already in November he was together with the XII. Interbrigade known as the access of Franco troops to the already abandoned Madrid was prevented. As the “savior of Madrid” at that time the most popular man of the Spanish Republic , the now general Kléber slowly made himself unpopular with high-ranking military and communist functionaries. Points of friction were, among other things, different military views. For example, Kléber turned against senseless burning up of communist cadres when attacking impregnable positions. In addition, he was accused of throwing a press around himself out of glory.

In the end, Kléber lost out in this conflict and was recalled to Moscow. Knowing the scope of this recall, the NKVD boss for Spain, Alexander Orlow , tried to get Kléber to the NKVD. However, this request was rejected by Moscow.

Victim of stalinism

For the time being, Stern worked again for Otto Kuusinen until he was arrested. During the NKVD interrogations , he was forced to confess that he had sabotaged Thalmann's course in the Hamburg uprising and was an agent in Germany's service in Spain. He was also accused of Trotskyism . In May 1939, the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to 15 years imprisonment, which he served in the Gulag on the Kolyma .

In November 1945 Stern was sentenced to another ten years of labor reform camp because he and eight fellow prisoners continued to represent "anti-Soviet views" and, among other things, claimed that "the CPSU / B / had allegedly degenerated and moved away from Marxist-Leninist positions". After being transferred to a special camp, Stern, who was meanwhile seriously ill and emaciated, was transferred to the Sosnovka labor camp in the far north of Siberia, where he died on February 18, 1954.

See also

• Siege of Madrid

literature

• Valery Brun-Zechowoj: Manfred Stern - General Kleber. The tragic biography of a professional revolutionary (1896–1954) . Wolfgang Weist, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89626-175-4 .
• Sidi Gross: General Manfred Stern alias Emilio Kleber. The family history of the Sterns. Papyrus, Tel Aviv 1995.
• Stern, Manfred . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Manfred Stern in the catalog of the German National Library
• Gerhard Oberkofler: The election of Leo Stern to the German Academy of Sciences (1955)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Antony Beevor : The Spanish Civil War. 2nd Edition. Goldmann, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , p. 209.
2. ^ Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War. 2nd Edition. Goldmann, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , p. 250.