Otto Kilian

Otto Kilian (born November 27, 1879 in Atzendorf ; † spring 1945 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp ) was a communist politician, journalist and writer.

Life

The trained typesetter joined the SPD in 1902 and became a full-time functionary in 1906. From 1907 he worked as an editor for the social democratic daily newspapers Bergische Arbeiterstimme ( Solingen ), Kasseler Volksblatt and Volksblatt ( Halle ). The opponent of the war and the SPD's civil peace policy was drafted to the front in 1915 and was a soldier until 1918. In 1917 he joined the newly founded USPD .

In 1918 Kilian returned to Halle after the November Revolution , where the talented speaker was elected chairman of the workers' council, he continued to head the Volksblatt , which had gone over to the USPD with a large part of the local SPD and was elected to the Prussian constituent assembly . After the revolution was suppressed by the Freikorps , Kilian was arrested in March 1919 and shortly thereafter sentenced to three years in prison, but soon given an amnesty. In 1920 he belonged to the left wing of the USPD, which merged with the KPD at the end of the year . At the same time, he had edited his experiences in prison in a volume of poetry entitled The Singing Dungeon .

In 1921 Kilian was one of the critics of the March Action , but, unlike, for example, the two party leaders Paul Levi and Ernst Däumig, remained in the party and was elected to the Prussian state parliament for the KPD in the same year . Within the party, Kilian belonged to the “left” wing around Arkadi Maslow and Ruth Fischer , after their election as party chairman, the party leadership entrusted Kilian with the post of Agitprop secretary for the Halle-Merseburg district. After Fischer and Maslow were dismissed following an intervention by Stalin , he, who had been re-elected to the Prussian state parliament in 1924, was in opposition to the new leadership around Ernst Thalmann .

As the leading head of the inner-party opposition in the Halle area, Kilian was expelled from the party in the summer of 1927, but was initially reinstated in November after " self-criticism ". In January 1928 Kilian finally left the KPD and a little later became a co-founder of the Lenin League , which he led in the Halle-Merseburg district. Upon cleavage of the Lenin League 1930 Kilian remained first on the side of the majority to Hugo Urbahns and in the organization, in 1932 joined the drawn now to Frankfurt Kilian of the Trotskyist elimination Left Opposition of the KPD on.

1933 after the takeover by the NSDAP Kilian was arrested and the whole Nazi period in various concentration camps detained shortly before the liberation in 1945, he died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration of typhoid .

Works

• The strange experience. Seals from prison. First part: the singing dungeon . Halle / Saale 1920.
• The revelations about the March fighting. What is revealed and secret . Halle / Saale 1922.
• The White Terror in Central Germany. The truth about the March fights . Halle / Saale 1925.
• Why the cherry trees in Mansfeld have blood-red leaves in autumn. Pictures from the business of the Mansfeld country, told in honor of its brave red proletariat . Leipzig 1925.

literature

• Kilian, Otto . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Kilian in the catalog of the German National Library