Paul Franken (politician)

Paul Franken (born June 27, 1894 in Höhscheid , † in autumn 1944 in Adak near Vorkuta ) was a socialist politician of the Weimar Republic and a victim of Stalinism.

Life

After attending primary school, the son of a foundry worker completed an apprenticeship as a moulder and needle maker from 1908. Since 1917 a member of the USPD , he was a member of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in Solingen during the November Revolution and from 1919 to 1920 party secretary of the Lower Rhine district. He initially assumed the position of district secretary after the merger of the USPD-Linke and KPD to form the VKPD , and he was also a member of the VKPD's central committee. His candidacy in the 1920 Reichstag elections was unsuccessful, but in February 1921 he was elected to the Prussian state parliament on the list of the VKPD (from which he was excluded again in the course of the conflict over the “March Action” in January 1922) . Through the short-lived KAG and the USPD, he became a member of the SPD in autumn 1922 , for which he held his mandate in the state parliament until the end of 1924. He also worked as a newspaper editor in Solingen.

In 1924 he moved to Zeitz , where he worked as an editor for the local social democratic daily Volksbote . In addition, he was a member of the executive committee of the local SPD and was active in cultural and educational work and in the Reich work group of child friends . In 1928, after a four-year hiatus, he became a member of the Prussian state parliament again, to which he belonged until the SPD was banned in the summer of 1933.

After the takeover of the Nazi Party and brief detention fled francs in 1933 in the Czechoslovak Republic. From here he moved to the Soviet Union in 1934 after brief stays in Sweden and Latvia, where he was imprisoned in 1937 as part of the Stalin purges . In autumn 1944 Paul Franken died in a gulag near Vorkuta .

literature

• Franconia, Paul . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Ernst Kienast (Ed.): Handbook for the Prussian Landtag , edition for the 5th electoral period, Berlin 1933, p. 320/321.

Web links

• Paul Franken's biography . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)