Robert Büchner

Robert Büchner played a key role in saving the Lenin monument in Eisleben in 1945

Hans Edgar Robert Büchner (born October 18, 1904 in Eisleben ; † August 22, 1985 in Berlin ) was a German communist , resistance fighter against National Socialism and a journalist in the GDR . He was dismissed as editor-in-chief of the Magdeburger Volksstimme in 1950 because of critical leading articles and expelled from the SED in 1953 , but reassigned in 1956.

Life

Resistance fighters against National Socialism

Büchner was born as the third son of a poor miner and learned the trade of a mill worker. Even as a youth he was involved in communist organizations, became a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) in 1922 and the KPD in 1924 . In 1928 he became editor of the newspaper Freiheit in Düsseldorf and from 1931 worked in Wuppertal . From November 1932 to 1934 he attended the International Lenin School of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow as a delegate of the KPD and then returned to Germany and became a member of the now illegal KJVD Reichsleitung.

On May 18, 1935, Büchner was arrested for illegal party work for the KPD in Stettin ; on January 27, 1936 , he was sentenced to five years in prison by the Berlin Court of Appeal , which he spent in the Roter Ochse prison in Halle (Saale) and in the Aschendorfer Moor prison camp until June 1940 dismounted. After his release he led the illegal resistance group Antifascist Workers' Group of Central Germany (AAM) with Otto Gotsche .

After the war, Buchner became the mayor appointed the Eisleben and founded even before the invasion of US troops on April 13, 1945 Otto Gotsche the short existing Workers' Party . On June 21, 1945, the occupying forces removed Büchner from the mayor's office.

In the meantime, at Büchner's instigation, a statue of Lenin, stolen from the Russian city of Pushkin in October 1943 and transported to Eisleben to be melted down, was placed in a central location of the city. The Americans withdrew on July 2, 1945, as Eisleben was now part of the Soviet occupation zone in Germany . The statue of Lenin by Eisleben has stood in the courtyard of the German Historical Museum in Berlin since 1991 .

Journalist in the GDR

In 1947 Büchner became editor-in-chief of the daily Volksstimme in Magdeburg, which also served as the SED's district party organ. In the spring of 1950 Büchner came into conflict with the party and state leadership of the GDR and was dismissed for "provocative behavior" because his editorials contained "deviations" and he had resisted the instructions of the SED state leadership.

Büchner studied for a few semesters at the party college of the SED and then became editor of the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland . In March 1953, however, there were renewed conflicts and Büchner was expelled from the SED by the SED Politburo for “behavior that was harmful to the party”. Büchner was then employed as a simple mill worker in the VEB Osthafenmühle.

In 1956 Büchner was admitted to the SED again at his own request and until his retirement he was a research assistant at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED (IML).

Works

• Robert Büchner: See you again after 40 years . 3. Edition. Dietz, Berlin 1960.

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 ).
• Jürgen Wilke (Hrsg.): Journalists and journalism in the GDR . Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-36205-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Robert Büchner - the first mayor of Eisleben after the Second World War on www.harz-saale.de

Web links

• Literature by and about Robert Büchner in the catalog of the German National Library