Max Fettling

Max Bruno Fettling (born February 24, 1907 in Berlin ; † February 14, 1974 there ) was a German trade unionist and a victim of Stalinism .

Life

Max Fettling was the son of a painter and attended elementary school . He then worked as a laborer in a shoe factory and on construction; In 1939 he was drafted into the fire police. At the beginning of 1945 he was transferred to Yugoslavia as an auxiliary policeman and was taken prisoner at the end of the war . From 1948 he was employed as a construction worker at various Berlin building sites and was the elected union representative of his work colleagues as chairman of the works union management in " VEB Industriehochbau".

In June 1953 Fettling was busy building the new clinic in Friedrichshain . After the SED -Zentralorgan New Germany on June 11 at the "new course" with its increases in labor standards mistakes had been granted, it came on 15 June of fat compact construction to the first strike , now in the disturbances during the popular uprising of 17 June to be counted. Brigade leader Alfred Metzdorf announced this stoppage on the evening of June 12th . At a works meeting it was decided to address a resolution to the SED leadership calling for a lowering of labor standards. Fettling drafted a text that was later tightened up by the workers in another works meeting. After discussing the text with a representative of the SED district leadership, he signed it and put the union stamp underneath it. On June 15, a delegation led by Fettling wanted to personally hand over the resolution to Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl . After she was turned away at the main entrance, she was admitted through a side entrance to the 27-year-old speaker, Kurt Ambrée, to whom they presented the document in a friendly atmosphere. Ambrée promised to take care of it and they drove back to work. In the further course of the uprising, Fettling acted rather de-escalating and dissuasive. He advised against further strikes and did not take part himself, but stayed at his place of work. Nevertheless, he was arrested on June 19, 1953 in his apartment and on May 26, 1954 in a joint trial, "because of long organized agent activity", with his colleagues Karl Emil August Foth and Otto Karl Heinrich Lembke, eight of them and the Maurer Bertold Emil Robert Stanicke, who was sentenced to four years, to ten years in prison convicted.

In the summer of 1957 he was released "on parole". Although he was born in Berlin, he no longer got a residence permit for East Berlin and therefore fled to West Berlin with his wife . There he worked as a porter and died a few days before his 67th birthday in a hospital in Berlin-Neukölln .

In 2003, the Friedrichshain Clinic was named “Max-Fettling-Platz” in memory of him. Sven Felix Kellerhoff thinks that Max Fettling got into the machinery of a vengeful SED judiciary through no fault of his own and therefore became more of a “hero against his will”. Fettling stands less for the active strike leaders, but rather for the participants in the popular uprising who have been innocently convicted of show and secret trials at the behest of the SED and who have been instrumentalized for propaganda.

literature

• Karin Schmidl: Honor for a little man . Berliner Zeitung , June 14, 2003 (article with private comments from his son-in-law)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} FDGB-Lexikon: Fettling, Max. 2009; online on the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung website.
2. ↑ Federal Ministry for All-German Issues: Injustice as a System: Documents on planned violations of the law in the Soviet occupation area. 1952, p. 127.
3. ^ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : A hero of June 17th? More like a reluctant hero . Die Welt , June 17, 2003.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Manfred Wilke : June 17, 1953 - "Day of German Unity" (II) . In: The Political Opinion , July 2003, pp. 1–10. Online on the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung website (pdf; 213 kB).
5. ^ ^{A b} Karl-Heinz Janßen: The Impromptu Revolution . The time 25/1993 from June 18, 1993.
6. ^ Klaus Wiegrefe : A German uprising . Spiegel Special 1/2006, February 21, 2006, pp. 94–97.
7. ↑ Max Fettling ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of the Hohenschönhausen Foundation; Retrieved June 17, 2015. 
8. ↑ Flyer June 17, 1953 - 60 years later ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. BVV Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg on fhxb-museum.de; accessed on June 17, 2015 (pdf; 932 kB). 
9. ↑ Sven Felix Kellerhoff: On-site meeting in Mitte: looking for traces in Berlin's inner city: history in stories. Berlin Story Verlag, 2007, p. 215.