Paul Albrecht (politician)

Paul Albrecht , pseudonym Karl Keiderling , (born February 7, 1902 in Erfurt ; † May 22, 1985 in Halle (Saale) ) was a German politician ( KPD , SED ) and trade unionist ( FAUD , DMV , RGO , EVMB , FDGB ).

Life

Weimar Republic and the time of National Socialism

Paul Albrecht was born the son of a worker and a laundress. He attended elementary school in Erfurt. Then he learned the trade of tool fitter . After completing his apprenticeship in 1919, Albrecht joined the DMV and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). In the following years he worked in companies in Erfurt and Berlin . Since 1920 Albrecht was involved in the proletarian, especially anarcho-syndicalist youth movement. In 1920 he took part in the fight against the Kapp Putsch .

In the Weimar Republic , Albrecht was initially close to the ideas of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism . At times Albrecht belonged to a Berlin anarchist group, in which Erich Mühsam and Herbert Wehner also frequented and in which he met his future wife Liesel Albrecht (1903–1990). In 1921 he joined the Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD) and left the DMV. Under the pseudonym "Karl Keiderling" he published in the magazine Junge Anarchisten . Although Albrecht preached “ardently about free love and the death of marriage” at that time, he married Liesel when she became pregnant. He was then derisively called "Sittenpaul" by critics and friends. The marriage was later divorced, but both remained on friendly terms. This is documented, for example, in the fact that Liesel Albrecht, who kept her ex-husband's name after the divorce, kept forbidden pamphlets and books for him in her apartment during the Nazi era.

Albrecht soon became a functionary in the union. From 1925 to 1930 he worked as a works council in the North German cable works in Berlin-Neukölln . At times he was chairman of the workers' council. Albrecht left FAUD in 1927 and joined the KPD two years later. Decisive influence that Albrecht was the anarcho-syndicalists to the Communists, had Walter Ulbricht , on whose initiative Albrecht as an elected representative of the fourth working conference of delegates in the Soviet Union after Moscow traveled. After the great metal workers' strike in the late autumn of 1930, he was disciplined, whereupon he became organizational director of the RGO in Berlin. At the end of 1932 Albrecht replaced the previous RGO district manager Erich Gentsch and held his position until the beginning of 1933.

In November 1932 Albrecht was elected to the Reichstag as a member of the KPD for constituency 2 (Berlin) . Just a month later, in December 1932, Albrecht left the Reich Parliament to move to the Prussian state parliament, the Prussian state parliament . Albrecht's mandate for the Reichstag was then continued by his party comrade Karl Elgas . In March 1933 he won another mandate in the Prussian state parliament for the KPD, but was no longer able to do so in view of the persecution by the National Socialists. At the time of the election, Albrecht was already in custody.

On the night of the Reichstag fire from February 27 to 28, 1933, Albrecht was taken into " protective custody " and interned in a camp in Berlin-Spandau before he was deported to the Sonnenburg concentration camp on June 1, 1933 and held for half a year. He was then released for the time being, but from then on and for the rest of the Nazi era he was placed under constant police supervision. He found work in a Berlin company as a toolmaker. In 1937 he was arrested again by the Gestapo , severely abused and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for a month .

In his book “Falsification and Instrumentalization of Antifascist Biographies”, Frank Hirschinger assumes that Albrecht renounced communism and became an opportunist . It is undisputed that Albrecht wrote a letter to the Berlin District Court in 1938 as part of a custody dispute with Liesel Albrecht, in which it says: “Yes, before 1933 I had a different political attitude. But when the Fuehrer offered his hand in reconciliation to the former opponents, I joined him gratefully and with sincere conviction ”. He also accused his ex-wife of "racial disgrace". The fact that Albrecht wrote the letter after a long interrogation and in fear of being imprisoned again in the concentration camp is not mentioned by Hirschinger.

When Albrecht's apartment was destroyed in an air raid in 1943, his new wife went to live with relatives in Genthin . In February 1945 Albrecht also fled Berlin and followed his wife. In Genthin he was hidden by local residents until the Red Army marched in on May 6, 1945.

Soviet Occupation Zone and German Democratic Republic (1945 to 1985)

After the war, on May 20, 1945, Albrecht was appointed mayor of Genthin by the district commander of the Red Army in the Jerichow II district , Lieutenant Colonel Chernow. A few weeks later, on August 19, he was entrusted with the office of district administrator of the Jerichow II district, which comprised 88 villages and the two cities of Jerichow and Genthin. Albrecht, who came to Genthin from Berlin “illegally” in February 1945, succeeded in first discrediting Mayor Müller, who was appointed by the Soviets, and later District Administrator Kinne, so that both were replaced by the occupiers. First Albrecht became mayor and the communist Dr. Meyer District Administrator. Albrecht complained that Meyer was "not up to his tasks". Paul Albrecht himself became a district administrator and was responsible to the Russians for implementing the land reform. His successor as Mayor of Genthin was Gustav Dittmann , his deputy as district administrator was first Kurt Hempel and then August Langnickel .

In the district of Jerichow II, in 1945 Albrecht was responsible for ensuring the food supply for the local population and the numerous refugees stranded there after the end of the war. In the following years he also coordinated the implementation of the socialist land reform in the district. On Albrecht's initiative, a youth brigade was set up in the district to support the implementation of the land reform. Under his leadership, 45,820 hectares of land in Jerichow II were expropriated and divided among 7,123 families, including 3,391 new farmers . Albrecht also had agricultural machines and equipment confiscated and redistributed. In contrast to these requisitioning measures, Albrecht also worked towards the preservation of existing structures at this time: In July 1945, for example, he successfully prevented the complete dismantling of the handle by the Soviet military administration in Germany .

Genthins city archivist John Kreutzmann made the following sarcastic judgment in 2006 about Albrecht's actions: "District Administrator Albrecht was more than hardworking". He even arranged for a landowner who refused to leave her home to be taken away in her bed. Albrecht also managed to get the Russians to expropriate the landowner von Jerchel , for whom the President of the Province of Saxony, Dr. Hübener wanted to achieve an exception. He ruthlessly demolished manor houses and castles, even if the state curator fought for them to be of cultural and historical value. Albrecht even decided to demolish the manor house in Milow , although the community wanted to use it as a school. By 1949, 16 buildings in the Jerichow II district had disappeared in this way. While Albrecht chased away landowners and released their buildings as quarries, contemporary witnesses describe how he himself developed a "master mentality". According to this, at a time of strict food rationing, Albrecht had the Kleinwusterwitz dairy bring a kilogram of butter “for private use” every week. It is also said in Genthin to this day that Albrecht had a tomb cleared in the Genthiner cemetery in order to bury his daughter there. However, these narratives do not stand up to deeper scrutiny.

In 1949 Albrecht was promoted to Ministerial Director in the Ministry of the Interior of Saxony-Anhalt in Halle (Saale) . In a short biography by John Kreutzmann about Albrecht it says: “A few years later he took over a position on the district board of the FDGB in Halle, although the reasons for his resignation from the state government remained obscure. Many of his later descriptions are fraught with contradictions and do not stand up to a deeper examination ”. The fact is that the Soviet Control Commission (SSK) came to the conclusion in 1951 that Paul Albrecht was a “bad criminal” who had extradited anti-fascists to the Gestapo. Albrecht had put his wife and other communists in danger, but there is no evidence of their arrests. In any case, Albrecht was expelled from the SED in 1951 and released from the Ministry of the Interior. However, he ostensibly resigned on August 31st because of his tuberculosis disease .

Albrecht then exercised self-criticism and endeavored to get his political rehabilitation by blaming petty-bourgeois anarchism for the “decomposition of my proletarian class consciousness”. In 1957 he was finally accepted back into the SED. On his 80th birthday in 1982, Albrecht was awarded the Gold Medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit because, according to the reasoning, he “did tireless political work among the working masses and represented the goals of the KPD”. In the last years of his life, Albrecht suffered from a severe heart condition and was almost completely blind.

While Frank Hirschinger and John Kreuzmann describe Albrecht as an opportunist and power politician, the social scientist Christoph Gollasch sees Albrecht's diverse life and political commitment as symbolic for Albrecht's generation and as a product of the left-wing extremist proletariat in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

Fonts

• Sexual Deprivation of Youth , 1926.
• Freedom of love , no date
• Biography and self-report , Ms. 1982. (Private print available in the Genthin District Museum)
• On the way to revolutionary workers' unity , 1984.

literature

• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
• Christoph Gollasch: "Paul Albrecht." In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Biographical Handbook, Volume 4 (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 6). Metropol, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-148-3 .
• Frank Hirschinger: Forgery and Instrumentalization of Anti-Fascist Biographies , 2006.
• John Kreutzmann: Genthin , 2004.

Web links

• Paul Albrecht in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 69 f.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Die taz , Berlin edition, April 4, 1991, p. 28.
3. ↑ See Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 71.
4. ↑ Cf. Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 74 f.
5. ↑ Cf. Stefan Heinz : Moscow's mercenaries? The "Unified Association of Berlin Metal Workers": Development and Failure of a Communist Union, Hamburg 2010, pp. 150, 233, 453
6. ↑ See Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 80
7. ↑ Cf. Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 82
8. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 83
9. ↑ See Christoph Gollasch: Paul Albrecht, in: Mielke et al., Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, Berlin 2013, p. 86