Oskar Wischeropp

Oskar Wischeropp (born June 11, 1882 in Magdeburg , † March 9, 1956 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( KPD / Leninbund ) and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Wischeropp trained as a lathe operator at Krupp . In 1906 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany . In 1907 he moved to Berlin and worked there as a cylindrical grinder. During the First World War he served as a soldier . In 1917 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany , in 1919 he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Wischeropp was the works council chairman at Borsig and in 1921 took over the management of the Red Aid in Berlin-Brandenburg . From November 1922 to 1928 he was an employee of the Soviet trade agency in Berlin. Until mid-1925 he was political director of the Berlin Tiergarten district of the KPD. As a follower of Ruth Fischer , Wischeropp was one of the capital's most famous left-wing communists. In 1926 he was therefore expelled from the KPD.

On December 5, 1926, Wischeropp was one of the founders of the Lenin League , in whose Reich leadership he was elected. In August 1927, together with seventeen other prominent left-wing communists - including Wolfgang Bartels , Ruth Fischer , Anton Grylewicz , Werner Scholem and Hugo Urbahns - he applied for re-entry into the KPD. However, this request was rejected by the Executive Committee of the Communist International on September 17, 1927 as a "provocation". As a result of the ultra-left turn of the XII. At the 1929 party congress, however, Wischeropp was accepted back into the KPD and even appointed as an instructor by the district leadership.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, Wischeropp continued to work illegally for the party. He was arrested in the fall of 1933. After three years of pre-trial detention, he was charged with 32 communist functionaries in the People's Court . Wischeropp was acquitted, however, "for lack of evidence". Nevertheless, he was not released, but held by the Gestapo in so-called “ protective custody ” for another six months. After Elser's assassination attempt on Hitler on November 8, 1939 in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller, Wischeropp was detained again for six weeks. Wischeropp's wife Gertrud (* 1894) was also persecuted by the National Socialists and arrested in December 1942. She died on June 19, 1944 as a result of her imprisonment in Höchst Hospital.

After the end of the war, Wischeropp worked in the Tiergarten district office from May 1945. He rejoined the KPD in 1945 and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1946 . In 1949 he moved to the eastern part of the city. Most recently, Wischeropp worked as a full-time employee of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship .

literature

• Rüdiger Zimmermann : The Lenin League. Left communists in the Weimar Republic . Droste, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-7700-5096-7 , pp. 36, 77 and 182.
• Harald Jentsch: The KPD and the "German October" 1923 . Koch, Rostock 2005, ISBN 3-938686-33-2 , p. 581.
• Hans-Rainer Sandvoss : The “other” capital of the Reich. Resistance from the labor movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 . Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-936872-94-1 , p. 352.
• Wiper, Oskar . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .