Paul Merker

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Paul Merker (born February 1, 1894 in Oberlößnitz , today Radebeul , † May 13, 1969 in Eichwalde ) was a politician and functionary of the KPD and the SED .

Life

Union, USPD, KPD

Merker, who comes from a Protestant family, worked as a waiter and hotel employee after attending elementary school. From 1912 to 1918 he was organized in a Christian , from 1919 in a free trade union . 1914–1918 Merker was a soldier in an airship division stationed in Mannheim-Sandhofen or in Jambol . In 1918 he joined the USPD and in 1920 the KPD. Until 1922 he was active as a trade union official, 1923-1924 secretary of the KPD district of West Saxony and 1924-1932 member of the Prussian state parliament . 1927–1930 and 1934–1945 he was a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KPD. One of his main activities in the late 1920s was again working in the party's trade union department. From 1929 Merker held the position of Reich Leader of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). In April 1930 he was dismissed because of "linksopportunistischer deviations" from the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party after he represents "ultra-left" escalation of social fascism -Begriffs of Hermann Remmele in the International had been criticized. Merker also had to hand over his post as RGO Reichsleiter to Fritz Emrich . Merker then occupied secondary positions in the party and was made available to the Communist International in 1931 .

USA, Soviet Union, Germany

From 1931 to 1933 he lived on behalf of the Communist International under the code name Max Fischer as an advisor to the Communist Party in the USA . In the summer of 1933 he moved to Leningrad . At the beginning of 1934 Merker returned to Germany to work illegally and was again active as a member of the Reich Committee of the illegal RGO. 1934–1935 he was a member of the illegal KPD state leadership as the successor to Philipp Daub . In 1935 and 1939 Merker was re-elected to the Central Committee and Politburo of the KPD.

Emigration and return

Paul Merker (front left) at the inauguration of the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park . Next to him Otto Grotewohl (1949)

From February 1937 he was a member of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the KPD, which from Paris was responsible for guiding the party in all countries of emigration (with the exception of the Soviet Union ). Since no new command center was set up in Germany after the great wave of arrests in 1935, the secretariat also acted de facto as the domestic management. After Walter Ulbricht left , Merker led the secretariat alone for a short time, from July 1938 together with Franz Dahlem . Immediately after the start of the war , the Secretariat requested the illegally living communist emigrants to register with the French authorities, with the intention of legalizing them. This decision, which from 1950 formed a main subject of the party and criminal proceedings against Merker, initially resulted in internment for many emigrants, and after the German occupation of France, not infrequently also in concentration camp imprisonment and death. Merker was interned in Le Vernet until February 1941 , then interned in Les Milles . In Les Milles he had the opportunity to leave the camp during the day. On the evening of July 1, 1941, he was intercepted on his way back to the camp by Fritz Fränken , who informed him that he was threatened with extradition to the Gestapo . Merker then went underground with Walter Janka , Otto Wahls and Georg Stibi . In 1942, with the help of Noel H. Field, he managed to escape from Marseille to Mexico . Here he worked as secretary of the Latin American committee of the movement "Free Germany" and regularly wrote articles for the magazine Free Germany .

Among other things, he advocated a comprehensive compensation concept for Jewish survivors:

“If all German rivers were ink and all German forests were pensticks, they would not be enough to describe the innumerable crimes that Hitler's fascism committed against the Jewish population. [...].
Only those anti-fascists can absolve themselves of the responsibility for the monstrous consequences of anti-Semitism, who since Hitler's seizure of power have incessantly jeopardized their freedom and their lives in the struggle against the mighty rising darkness and against the reaction that reached its peak in Hitler's fascism. […]
It is they who, fulfilled by the ideals of their struggle for the advancement of the human race, voluntarily take the responsibility that the crimes committed against their Jewish fellow citizens - as far as this is possible - are redeemed. "

In 1946 Merker returned to Germany, where he was a member of the party executive, the Central Secretariat and the Politburo of the SED , a member of the Brandenburg State Parliament , since 1948 a member of the People's Council and the Provisional People's Chamber and 1949–1950 State Secretary in the GDR Ministry of Agriculture. From 1946 to 1949, together with Helmut Lehmann , he headed the German Administration for Labor and Social Welfare (since 1948 the Central Administration for Labor and Social Welfare ).

Exclusion from the party and conviction as a "French agent"

In terms of form, Merker was one of the party's closest leadership in the early years of the SED. In April 1946 he was one of the seven KPD representatives who were elected to the fourteen-member central secretariat of the SED. In 1949, after the party leadership had been reorganized, he moved into the Politburo. In conversations that he had with the historian Wolfgang Kießling in the last years of his life , Merker emphasized that he had not been involved in fundamental decisions from the start; Since 1948 he had felt that he had no future in the party leadership. As far as we know today, one of the main reasons for the mistrust that was shown to Merker by Soviet authorities and Ulbricht's group was a statement by Anton Ackermann , first made in 1940 to representatives of the Comintern and KPD in Moscow, and later confirmed several times In 1939, when the KPD secretariat in Paris was consulting, immediately after the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty became known, Merkers had a "wild, unimaginably blatant anti-Soviet failure", during which Merkers "showed his real face for a few minutes (...)". According to Norman Naimark , Merker was also seen by the SMAD as an advocate of a more radical line of the SED and a sympathizer of "sectarian" former KPD members who had only reluctantly participated in the compulsory unification of the SPD and KPD into the SED and initially still agreed at least at the local and regional level Influence.

In the summer of 1950, against the background of the Noel Field affair and the Budapest Rajk trial, party proceedings were opened against Merker. He was questioned by the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK) and expelled from the SED on August 22nd, along with Willi Kreikemeyer , Leo Bauer , Bruno Goldhammer , Lex Ende and Maria Weiterer . Although the ZPKK saw Merker as the most severely affected person, he - unlike Kreikemeyer, Bauer and Goldhammer - was not arrested after being expelled from the party because Wilhelm Pieck had intervened in his favor. Merker was assigned Luckenwalde as his place of residence, where he ran a restaurant of the HO until 1952 .

After an alleged “conspiratorial center” was uncovered again in the course of the Slansky Trial in Prague and Merker's name was also mentioned, he was arrested on November 30, 1952 and taken to the MfS remand center. A declaration published by the Central Committee of the SED on December 20, 1952, accused Merker of being part of the "conspiracy" revealed in Prague and of having been its leader in the GDR. In this context, reference was made to Merker's “ Zionist ” positions for the first time . Merker had called for compensation for the Jewish assets expropriated by the National Socialists in Mexico in the 1940s and in articles thereafter in Neues Deutschland ; As the only member of the Politburo and the Central Committee, he supported the establishment of a Jewish nation state and spoke out in favor of the restitution of " Aryanized " property and compensation payments, which the SED demonized as "plundering the working German people".

After more than two years of pre-trial detention, on 29./30. March 1955 a closed trial against Merker took place before the 1st Criminal Senate of the Supreme Court of the GDR , which ended with his sentencing to an eight-year prison sentence for incitement to war and boycott . He was accused of having worked for years as a “Zionist agent” on the “plundering of Germany” and the “shifting of German national wealth” in favor of American and “Jewish monopoly capitalists”. The court saw it as proven that Merker had been an informant or agent of the French secret service since 1941/42 at the latest and that his later actions “directed against the existence of the German Democratic Republic”. Merker maintained contacts with the secret service after the end of the war through the "agents" Otto Katz , Otto Fischl and Bedřich Geminder, who were sentenced to death in the Slansky trial . In the grounds of the judgment - in addition to other issues, such as his alleged political and personal closeness to Earl Browder - Merker's position on the issue of compensation, his attitude towards Israel and his connections to “Zionist circles” in Mexican emigration were rated as burdensome.

Rehabilitation

tomb

In January 1956, Merker was released from prison. After being bedridden for two months, he justified his rejection of the accusations made against him in letters to President Wilhelm Pieck and the Central Party Control Commission and called for his public rehabilitation. The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, Walter Ulbricht, replied that the “release by the party and the state organs would be regarded as rehabilitation”. In July 1956, the same court that sentenced him acquitted him in a secret trial.

On November 21, 1956, Merker took part - according to Kießling "unconsciously and unintentionally" - in Kleinmachnow at a meeting of the group around Walter Janka and Wolfgang Harich , whose protagonists were arrested a little later. On January 9, 1957, Merker confirmed to interrogators of the Stasi that Harich in Kleinmachnow had demanded the removal of Walter Ulbricht; in July 1957 he appeared as a witness in the show trial against Janka. Because, contrary to an agreement with the prosecution, he initially did not incriminate Janka during the hearing, Attorney General Ernst Melsheimer successfully threatened him with the words:

“Do you even know that you belong in the dock? That only a hair separates you from the traitor Janka. They belong in the seat next to him. And if you are not telling the truth here, you must expect to take the place next to him after all. "

Merker then began to incriminate Janka in a choked voice and was later removed from the courtroom with the support of a clerk.

In 1957 Merker, whose resumption of membership in the SED was decided by the Politburo on December 29, 1956, was given a house in Eichwalde in Brandenburg. In the same year he began to work as a lecturer for foreign-language literature at the Volk und Welt publishing house . In 1966 he sat as a "honored party veteran" in the presidium of the festive event for the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the SED. When Merker died in 1969, the GDR government posthumously awarded him the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold. On the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1964 he received the Order of the Labor Banner .

His urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the Memorial of the Socialists in the Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried.

On January 8, 1974, the Deutsche Post honored the GDR with a 10-Pfennig postage stamp from the series “ Personalities of the German Labor Movement ”.

Fonts

  • Germany. To be or not to be? Volume 1: From Weimar to Hitler , El libro libre , México 1944
  • Germany. To be or not to be? Volume 2: The Third Reich and its End , El Libro Libre, México 1945

Literature / Documentation

Essays

Radio

  • Thomas Gaevert : I didn't want to be a traitor. The Paul Merker case and the SED. Radio documentation 50 minutes, production: Südwestrundfunk 2007, first broadcast: September 20, 2007 on SWR2

Web links

Commons : Paul Merker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard UP, 1997; German barrel. See lit.)
  2. ↑ See details Stefan Heinz : Moscow's mercenaries? The “Unified Association of Berlin Metal Workers”: Development and Failure of a Communist Union, Hamburg 2010, pp. 89 ff., 94 ff., 277 ff.
  3. ↑ See Remmele, Hermann, keep up! Why must the struggle be directed against two fronts ?, in: Die Internationale, Vol. 13, No. 5/6, pp. 135–158 (continuations in issue 7, pp. 198–221, issue 8/9, pp. 230-259, No. 10, pp. 295-313).
  4. ↑ See Kinner, Klaus , Der deutsche Kommunismus. Self-image and reality. Volume 3. In War (1939–1945), Berlin 2009, p. 22.
  5. ↑ The view of a participant in Dahlem, Franz, on the eve of the second world war. 1938 to August 1939. Memories, Berlin 1977, Volume 2, pp. 423–433.
  6. ↑ Paul Merker: Hitler's anti-Semitism and us . In: Free Germany, Volume 1, No. 11 October 1942, pp. 9–11.
  7. ↑ See Malycha, Andreas, Party of Stalin's Grace? The development of the SED into a new type of party in the years 1946 to 1950, Berlin 1996, pp. 68, 109.
  8. ↑ See Kießling, Wolfgang, partner in “Narrenparadies”. The Friends of Noel Field and Paul Merker, Berlin 1994, p. 14.
  9. ↑ Quoted from Kießling, Partner, p. 18.
  10. ↑ Quoted from Kießling, Partner, p. 18.
  11. ↑ See Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany. The Soviet Occupation Zone 1945 to 1949, Berlin 1999, p. 545.
  12. ↑ until then editor-in-chief of the Deutschlandsender . Angelika Timm says: Prominent Jewish victim of this campaign was (..) the editor-in-chief ... Goldhammer ... , in: Hammer, Zirkel, Star of David. 158f, with reference to Jerry E. Thompson: Jews, Zionism and Israel. The story of the jews in the German Democratic Republic since 1945. Ann Arbor 1978
  13. ↑ See Kießling, Wolfgang, “Leistner is Mielke”. Shadow of a forged biography, Berlin 1998, p. 143.
  14. ^ Thomas Haury: Anti-Semitism in the GDR. Federal Agency for Civic Education November 28, 2006.
  15. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Historical revisionism from an MfS perspective ( Memento from June 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 132 kB)
  16. ↑ Reasons for the judgment, quoted in Herf, Jeffrey, Antisemitismus in der SED. Secret documents on the Paul Merker case from SED and MfS archives, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 42, issue 4/1994, pp. 635–667, p. 643.
  17. ^ Thomas Haury: Anti-Semitism in the GDR. Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) November 28, 2006.
  18. ↑ Reasons for the judgment, quoted in Herf, Antisemitismus, p. 649.
  19. ^ Reasons for the judgment, quoted in Herf, Antisemitismus, p. 647.
  20. ↑ Kießling, Partner, p. 214.
  21. ↑ See Kießling, Partner, p. 216.
  22. ↑ Walter Janka: Difficulties with the truth. Essay, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989, p. 103. ISBN 3-499-12731-8
  23. ↑ High awards given . In: Neues Deutschland , January 30, 1964, p. 2
  24. ↑ Lipsia no. 1693; Michel no. 1009
  25. ↑ Marker: passim, approx. 50 mentions, also related chap. about him
personal data
SURNAME Marker, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD, SED), MdV
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberlößnitz , today Radebeul
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1969
Place of death Eichwalde