Otto Wahls

Otto Joseph Robert Wilhelm Wahls (code name Otto Börner ; born November 4, 1907 in Hamburg , † April 2, 1990 in Mexico City ) was a German communist , editor , resistance fighter against the Nazi regime and Spain fighter .

Life

Wahls, the son of a baker, learned the profession of printer . In 1921 he first joined the Socialist Workers' Youth , then the Communist Youth of Germany . In October 1923 he took part in the Hamburg uprising . In 1925 he was one of the co-founders of the Red Front Fighters Association (RFB) and its Red Young Front in Hamburg-Barmbek . From 1925 to 1927 Wahls was Gaufführer of the Red Young Front Wasserkante. At the district conference of July 26, 1925, he was elected to the board of the RFB Groß-Hamburg as a representative of the Jungfront. At the RFB Federal Congress in 1927 Wahls was elected to the Reich leadership and he took over the leadership of the Red Young Front in Berlin-Brandenburg . He was also their Reichsleiter at times. During the Wittorf affair Wahls stood behind Ernst Thälmann and positioned himself against Werner Jurr and other critical young front functionaries. In 1929 he was a course student at the International Lenin School in Moscow for six months .

Wahls returned from Moscow at the end of 1929 and became editor of the KPD newspaper Klassenkampf in Halle (Saale) . In 1930/31 he was editor of the Ruhr-Echoes in Essen . In August 1931 he was sentenced to one year imprisonment for “literary treason”. From November 1932 he was editor of the communist Hamburger Volkszeitung .

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Wahls joined the illegal secretariat of the KPD district leadership in Wasserkante from February 1933. In September 1933 he went to Berlin and became political director for Berlin-Brandenburg. From the beginning of 1934 to March 1935 he worked in Berlin as head of the state leadership of the illegal KPD in the Reich. Wahls was co-opted into the Central Committee in 1933 . During the clashes between Franz Dahlem , Fritz Schulte and the majority of the Politburo against Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck , he was one of the so-called "left-wing sectarian Thälmann supporters".

In March 1935 Wahls traveled to Moscow via Prague under the pseudonym Otto Börner . In the summer of 1935 he took part as a delegate at the VII World Congress of the Communist International and in October of the same year at the Brussels Conference of the KPD in Moscow. There it came to violent disputes because of election critical reports about the situation in Germany as head of the state management (1934/35). He was accused of "pessimism" and, like Hermann Schubert and Fritz Schulte, sharply attacked. Since his self-criticism was seen as insufficient, Wahls was no longer appointed to the Central Committee. Then Wahls worked for the German editorial team at Radio Moscow .

In September 1936, the German representation at the EKKI rejected the proposal of the transfer commission to include elections in the CPSU because of “group-like tendencies and sectarianism”. Wahls volunteered for Spain, was allowed to leave the country and thus - in all probability - avoided liquidation by the NKVD . As a member of the International Brigades , he was awarded the medal “Bravery before the enemy” for the outbreak he organized from four hundred encircled interbrigadists. After the victory of the Franquists in the Spanish Civil War , Wahls fled to France. There he was interned after the beginning of the Second World War in Le Vernet , then in Les Milles . Wahls, together with Paul Merker , Walter Janka and Georg Stibi , did not return to the Les Milles camp on July 1, 1941 after a day trip to Marseille and went underground. He received a visa for Mexico , where he arrived on December 16, 1941 as a passenger on the Portuguese ship Serpa Pinto together with around 40 German Communists (including Georg Stibi, Walter Janka and Alexander Abusch ).

Under the name Otto Börner , Wahls became head of the leadership group of the KPD in Mexico in January and worked in the Bund Free Germany. He was the editor of the bulletin Alemania Libre, which was expanded into a newspaper . After Paul Merker's arrival in June 1942, Georg Stibi and then Wahls were removed from their positions. On April 6, 1943, Börner gave a written declaration of his "mistakes" and withdrew from active party work. On November 1, 1945, the leadership of the KPD group in Mexico under Paul Merker decided "to exclude Otto Börner from the party for gross neglect of his party obligations".

Wahls stayed in Mexico and worked as a printer and salesman and was most recently employed as a cashier in the paint factory of the former Austrian interbrigadist Bruno Meier in Mexico City.

literature

• Wolfgang Kießling : Alemania Libre in Mexico: A Contribution to the History of Anti-Fascist Exile (1941-1946) . Volume 1. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1974, p. 313.
• Wolfgang Kießling: Exile in Latin America . Reclam, Leipzig 1980, pp. 189, 223 and 231.
• Bernd Kaufmann: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-320-01817-5 , p. 332 and passim.
• Hans-Joachim Fieber et al. (Ed.): Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime 1933 to 1945. A biographical lexicon. Volume 12 [Second Supplementary Volume, K – Z]. Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2005, p. 255.
• Wahls, Robert 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 .