Otto Fleischer

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Otto Fleischer 1967

Otto Fleischer (born January 30, 1901 in Breslau ; † March 28, 1989 in Radensleben near Neuruppin ) was a German mining engineer, spy for the BND and a victim of the GDR secret and show trials in the early 1950s.

Life

Otto Fleischer went to school in Trebnitz / Silesia . During high school he worked as a mountain intern in the uncle's mine in Katowice . In 1923 he passed the Abitur at the secondary school in Breslau and began studying mining at the Technical University of Berlin . He graduated with a diploma in 1926 and took a job as an assistant to a coal mine in Beuthen / Upper Silesia , where he became mine operator in 1933. From 1930 to 1933 he was a member of the SPD . In 1933 he became a 3rd degree Freemason Master .

He continued his professional career under the National Socialists and headed the Giesche mine in Katowice from 1939 to 1945 . In 1942 he received the War Merit Cross 2nd Class and in 1943 the title of "Mine Director". Fleischer worked for Albert Speer's armaments ministry and, in his and Speer's names, applied for patent No. 94957 for a pulverized coal engine . It was based on a controlled coal dust explosion and was intended to be used in place of liquid fuel at the end of the war, but never came to fruition.

After the war, Fleischer worked as a scientific assistant at the Bergakademie Freiberg , then as the technical director of the coal administration and in April 1950 became a full professor of mining studies. He had been a member of the SED since the party was founded in 1946 and a member of the Saxon state parliament from 1950 to 1952 .

Arrest and trial

Arrest warrant for butcher (1952)

The GDR authorities arrested Otto Fleischer on December 22, 1952 on the grounds that he had been incriminated by accused of the "Kappler Group". His friends and colleagues Wilhelm Kappler, Hans Hertel and Conrad Kuchheida had already been arrested in the weeks before, and a little later Georg Bank, Bruno Fankhänel and Herbert Kribus. The allegation was sabotage against mining facilities in the GDR and espionage for Western secret services.

Shaft IV of the Martin Hoop hard coal works, 1962. A mining accident in this shaft in 1952 was the possible trigger for Fleischer's trial.

In retrospect, Fleischer saw a mine accident on April 19, 1952 as the trigger for the criminal proceedings that followed, but not as the cause: 48 miners died in a fire in shaft IV of the Zwickau Martin Hoop plant . The search for someone to blame for the inadequate security precautions turned into a show trial that was supposed to attribute the GDR's economic problems to a Western network of agents. Fleischer's situation was exacerbated by the general political weather situation of increasingly dissatisfied citizens (supply bottlenecks) and the ensuing uprising on June 17th . The hearing was originally scheduled for June 2, 1953, but was postponed due to political developments.

Custody

During his pre-trial detention, Fleischer had no contact with the outside world, as was customary in the GDR justice system at the time. His preferred attorney was not admitted, the public defender came only two days before the start of the trial. Fleischer writes in his records from 1980 that he was not tortured physically, but mentally, and as a result admitted one accusation after another by his interrogators:

"In and of itself, [...] the solitary confinement, the tone of the interrogations, the accusations like" criminal, rascal, saboteur "that fell on me like a club, the at times dense series of night interrogations, were enough to get an indictment against me as the top official to build up a "gang of conspirators left behind in the GDR according to plan". [...] I was no longer capable of criticizing what was written down and what I had to sign when I was totally exhausted and could return to the protective walls of my solitary cell and close my eyes for a moment, even if only while sitting or standing until the guard in front of the cell door yelled at me: "Get up, you were asleep."

- Fleischer's notes In: Memoirs and contemporary documents on the 100th birthday , January 2001

process

The trial took place before the 1st Criminal Senate of the Supreme Court of the German Democratic Republic from September 21 to 26, 1953 in Berlin. The then acting Vice-President of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Walter Ziegler , conducted the hearing. Associate judges were Theodor Seidel and Max Möbius, Heinrich Löwenthal was assistant judge. The Public Prosecutor's Office was represented by Attorney General Ernst Melsheimer and Kurt Flemming, and the minutes were kept by Barfus. The verdict was 15 years imprisonment and five years denial of civil rights because of war and boycott incitement .

The trial was one of the first and largest of a whole series of proceedings in which the GDR judiciary passed harsh judgments against alleged opponents of the regime with a broad law ("boycott agitation"). This judgment was exacerbated by the fact that the workers' uprising of June 17, 1953 alarmed the GDR leadership and urged them to use their judiciary to deter them. In addition, Western secret services were formed during this time, above all the Gehlen service , the predecessor of the Federal Intelligence Service , whose agent Clemens Laby was provided with information by the accused according to the trial files. Laby and Fleischer had known each other since their studies; Laby was also a qualified mining engineer. The allegation of espionage focused in the grounds of the judgment on the following alleged meeting of Fleischers with Laby:

“At the beginning of 1947 a meeting took place between Laby and the defendants Fleischer and Kappler in Zwickau, during which Laby explained to the defendants that the Ruhr industry was not thinking of supplying material for the expansion of the national coal industry. It was now a matter of proving that the building of the national economy would not be possible without the help of the capitalist Ruhr industry. All three then agreed to include more people in their plan. […] Laby was interested in collecting news about the development of the Zwickau-Oelsnitzer hard coal mining for the coal mining management [in the west]. The documents and verbal information that Fleischer then delivered to Laby made it possible to gain a detailed overview of the entire situation in the Saxon coal mining industry and of the conditions in the Freiberg mining academy. [...]

By disclosing the intended purchases from the West, the American secret service was able to put the materials urgently needed for the Saxon hard coal mining on their so-called reserve list and thus prevent delivery to the German Democratic Republic. "

- Reasons for the judgment, p. 16, Zwickau City Archives

The defense attorney appointed by Otto Fleischer was rejected by the court and replaced by a public defender. Only invited guests were present during the process. Mueller's wife was taken from the train at the Ostbahnhof on her journey to Berlin and sent back. The court accused all seven of the accused of sabotage in addition to gathering information for a "number of agents and espionage agencies of German and American monopoly capital". Fleischer, for example, relocated "a complete electric locomotive conveyor system, which was provided for the development of the northeast field, [...] to the Rudolf-Breitscheidt-Schacht", "where it remained unused for three years and was exposed to rot." (Ibid., 17) "in addition, Fleischer was the son- Adenauer , Wehrhahn , the owner of the Horremer lignite mines and associated briquette, in conjunction" and gave its technical director "Bitschnau [...] overview of the entire lignite industry in the German Democratic Republic" ( ibid, p. 19). As is often the case in these trials, the accused was placed in key positions under National Socialism; also contacts to the Jehovah's Witnesses, which in the GDR are regarded as a spy organization for the West .

Dealing with academics

In the 1st Culture Ordinance of the German Economic Commission of March 31, 1949, the GDR leadership had spoken out in favor of moderate dealings with established scientists, i.e. those who were already active during the Nazi era, in order not to let them migrate to the West. In the judgment against Fleischer, the court quotes this paragraph, but does not consider it to be applicable to the defendants: “A few members of the old intelligentsia [...] felt themselves to be 'officers of capital' and could not break their ties to the monopoly rulers . ”Yet the verdict was mild in relation to the monstrous allegations; death sentences were passed in many trials of the time with less “intelligence” in the dock. The study permit for Fleischer's sons was also a sign of a certain reluctance.

Imprisonment and amnesty

Otto Fleischer came to a special warehouse in Gumnitz near Eggesin . This was a branch of the "Camp X" operated by the MfS in Hohenschönhausen . Together with at times 100 experts (builders, chemists, physicists, electronics technicians), Fleischer continued to research his old Speer patent for solid rocket propulsion - without any result, but, as he wrote in his private memoirs, well rewarded ("engineering salary group V, 1500 to 1600 marks gross ”). Fleischer was released from prison in 1961 as part of an amnesty on the occasion of Walter Ulbricht's rise to the position of Chairman of the State Council and thus Head of State of the GDR. Until his retirement in 1966 he was an employee of the Mansfeld Combine in Eisleben, where, among other things, he worked on a mechanical mining method for copper mining .

On December 19, 1991 , he was unanimously rehabilitated by the 6th criminal division of the Berlin Regional Court (Cassation Court). Otto Fleischer fought for this rehabilitation since his release from prison, but died in 1989 in Radensleben near Neuruppin. In his personal, never-published notes, he called the criminal case a “life catastrophe”, the “why” of which occupied him until the end of his life.

Publications

  • Mining observations and experiments on rock movements in Upper Silesian coal mining to clarify questions about rock pressure . In: Glückauf . No. 29-31 . Glückauf, Essen 1934, p. 25 (Breslau, TeH., Diss., 1933).
  • Otto Fleischer, Jürgen Fleischer (ed.): Memoirs of a mining engineer. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2014, ISBN 978-3-7322-6481-0 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Fleischer exercised the function there as a member of the Kulturbund .
  2. ^ The arrest warrant from the Stasi office in Freiberg is dated December 22, 1952 and was carried out in the early evening hours; a second arrest warrant from the court in Chemnitz followed the next day.
  3. ↑ Some sources speak of 47 dead miners.
  4. ↑ Fleischer was scientifically involved in the development of shaft IV; a photo shows him in miner's clothing in this pit in 1948.
  5. ↑ In a trial like this and numerous others in the early GDR, the characteristics typical of a show trial and a secret trial were mixed up because the public was invited, but consisted exclusively of “reliable” party members, employees of the State Security and GDR press, man so was "among themselves". On the other hand, the GDR was interested in reporting on this process.
  6. ^ Ziegler took over the trial from Hilde Benjamin , who became GDR Justice Minister in July 1953. His career took a leap with this procedure. He served as a judge in a number of other high-profile political trials in the 1950s, including a. against Elli Barczatis / Karl Laurenz and Karl Wilhelm Fricke .
  7. ↑ Max Möbius previously held judicial posts at the Dessau Regional Court and the Halle Higher Regional Court. In 1953 he was described as an "old communist loyal to the line from before 1933, [but] technically unqualified". (See Hermann Wentker: Justice in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–1953 , p. 454)
  8. ↑ Trial documents, judgment of the trial; Archive of the city of Zwickau
  9. ↑ In addition to incitement to war and boycott , Article IX, numbers 3–9 of the Control Council Directive No. 36 also played an important role.
  10. ↑ see also Karl Wilhelm Fricke: file inspection. Reconstruction of a political persecution. Berlin 1996
  11. ↑ Clemens Laby (* November 22, 1900, † unknown) is unknown to the archives of the Federal Intelligence Service (status: end of 2011). However, he was mentioned in several criminal trials in the GDR in the 1950s, always as a contact for Western secret services. See BStU files MfS HA IX / Tb / 2166-2188, MfS AOP 77/53, MfS AU 406/55
  12. ↑ The defendants were sentenced to prison terms of between four and a half and fifteen years, Fleischer and Kappler receiving the highest sentence.
  13. ↑ The court also overturned the judgments against Fleischer's seven co-defendants
personal data
SURNAME Butcher, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mining engineer, member of the Saxon state parliament
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 1989
Place of death Radensleben near Neuruppin