Otto Gäbel

This article deals with the communist Otto Gäbel. For the Prussian ministerial official, see Otto Gaebel .

Otto Gäbel (born December 4, 1885 in Festenberg , Lower Silesia, † May 1, 1953 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( KPD ).

Life

The trained bookbinder Gäbel joined the SPD in Berlin in 1905 . As an opponent of war policy , Gäbel took part in a conference of the opposition that took place on March 5, 1915 in Berlin in Wilhelm Pieck's apartment . The conference decided to publish the magazine “Die Internationale”, after which the group was named. Although a member of the " Gruppe Internationale " or the Spartakusbund , Gäbel did not join the KPD when it was founded, but remained a member of the USPD , to which he had belonged since 1917. At the split party conference in Halle (Saale) in October 1920 he was elected to the Central Committee of the USPD (Left). The delegates of the unification party congress of the KPD and USPD (Left) in December 1920 (VIth party congress) in Berlin and the VIIth party congress in August 1921 in Jena elected him as an assessor at the headquarters of the KPD.

In December 1921, Gäbel protested with Otto Brass, among other things, against the attitude of the KPD headquarters to the March Action and the Communist Working Group (KAG). Gäbel nevertheless remained a member of the party. In 1921/22 he was responsible for the “Communist Party Correspondence” and acted as secretary of the Prussian parliamentary group of the KPD. From 1926 to 1929 he was head of the communal department of the Central Committee of the KPD. From 1921 to 1929 he worked as a city councilor and later as an unpaid city councilor in Berlin. He was also chairman of the city council of the KPD. Gäbel was a co-founder and board member of the Red Aid , founder and board member of the Workers Aid for Soviet Russia, which later became the International Workers Aid .

After the Sklarek scandal in Berlin was uncovered (1929), Gäbel received a party reprimand for his connection to Sklarek and was then expelled from the KPD on October 9, 1929 for "unproletarian behavior". But Gäbel remained the "Illustrated Press Service," a company of the 1930-1932 Head Münzenberg -Konzerns. He also worked for the communist daily newspapers “ Welt am Abend ” and “Berlin am Morgen”.

Because of his involvement in the Sklarek scandal, Gäbel was sentenced to a prison term of one and a half years and arrested in the courtroom on June 28, 1932, just like the communist city councilor Gustav Degner . Despite the Hindenburg amnesty in December 1932, Gäbel was not released and remained in custody until March 1934.

After 1933, Gäbel was investigated for tax evasion, as he was a partner in various KPD companies until he was expelled from the party, including Vulkan GmbH and Peuvag AG (KPD newspaper printers). However, this investigation has been discontinued. After his release from prison in 1934, Gäbel contacted illegal groups. From 1934 to 1937 he was unemployed, from 1935 onwards he was temporarily unskilled for Berlin correspondence. In February 1937, Gäbel was temporarily arrested and charged with connection with the Czech intelligence service. However, he had to be acquitted for lack of evidence. From 1938 to 1945 he was, among other things, chief archivist of the “Special Archives of German Economy” in Berlin.

After the end of the war, from May 1945, Gäbel set up the Victims of Fascism Unit in the Berlin-Zehlendorf district office . From September 1945 he acted as a polling officer of the KPD in the Nikolassee district and from February 1946 was a member of the district committee of the FDGB Berlin-Zehlendorf.

Fonts

• Against the lie of neutrality. A contribution to the trade union question . Association of Bookbinders, Berlin 1924.
• Guide through the right to vote in the Berlin municipal parliaments with an appendix on assembly and press rights . Internationaler Arbeiter-Verlag, Berlin 1929.

literature

• Herbert Michaelis: Causes and Consequences: From the German collapse in 1918 and 1945 to the state reorganization of Germany in the present. A collection of certificates and documents on contemporary history. Biographical register . Volume 1 [A-K]. Document publishing house H. Wendler, Berlin 1979, p. 211.
• Gäbel, Otto . 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 , pp. 279f.