Rolf Markert

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rolf Markert (actually Helmut Thiemann , another pseudonym probably Rolf Hellmuth , Helmuth or Helmut ; born January 24, 1914 in Werdau ; † January 30, 1995 in Berlin ) was a German politician ( KPD / SED ), resistance fighter against the Nazi regime and Major General of the Ministry for State Security (MfS). From 1953 to 1981 he was head of the Dresden district administration of the MfS.

Life

Helmut Thiemann was the son of a bricklayer and attended elementary school . He joined the pioneer organization when his father was sentenced to five years in prison for participating in the Central German uprising in 1923 , although he was given amnesty and emigrated that same year. He lived with his mother in great need. Markert learned the profession of piano maker , later he also worked as a bricklayer. In 1928 he joined the KJVD . From 1929 to 1931 he headed the Untergau Zwickau of the Red Young Front. In 1931 he went on a journey, first in Lithuania and Latvia , then in the Soviet Union . He worked as a furnace maker and locksmith in the heavy machinery plant in Sverdlovsk , became a member of the Komsomol and the CPSU . In 1932/33 he was a full-time employee of the union, responsible for the guidance of Volga Germans . In 1934 he attended the school of the Communist Youth International in Chotkowa near Moscow .

In 1934 Thiemann returned to Germany via Prague . In Berlin he participated in the resistance and did illegal work. He was arrested shortly before the end of 1934 and sentenced in 1935 to three and a half years in prison for “preparing for high treason ”. Initially imprisoned in Luckau prison, he was sent to the Esterwegen and Aschendorfermoor concentration camps in 1937 . After serving his sentence, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1938 . There he was accepted as a member of the party by the illegal party organization of the KPD in the same year. Thiemann was responsible for the "defense" against informers and informers and was the liaison to the Eastern European communist prisoners. At the turn of 1938/39 he became a nurse in the prisoner infirmary. From 1943 to 1945 he was also a member of the military political leadership in the camp. He was very familiar with Ernst Busse and Erich Reschke .

The Soviet secret service came into possession of documents on the Ukrainian front that Thiemann should be part of the Zeppelin company . According to this, Thiemann would have been released in September 1942 in order to work as an agent behind the front in the National Socialists' secret enterprise. Thiemann was never used for this, but stayed in Buchenwald until the liberation on April 11, 1945.

Thiemann used his position as a prisoner functionary in consultation with the illegal party organization to assert himself against other groups of prisoners. In the process, he and other prison inmates killed other inmates in the infirmary. He justified himself to the KPD in the summer of 1945:

“In order to enforce our line, we were forced to help the SS doctors in some things ourselves, difficult as it was for us. […] The SS doctors murdered several comrades, and I too had to help out. Not that I only helped, but that I was also forced to take care of things. I have to mention that I got this business from Gen. Krämer took over. I could refuse it and at the beginning I resisted it. But after I was informed by the party of the necessity of these tasks, I had to draw the conclusions. […] That was the question for us [communists]. Either we reject this work and remain humanly clean or we give up the position and thereby become indirect murderers of our own comrades. Since our comrades were worth more to us than everyone else, we had to take a step together with the SS, namely in the extermination of hopeless sick people and collapsing people. In spite of the fact that it was difficult from a human point of view to carry out all of this, we destroyed every danger that was noticeable in the camp. "

- Helmut Thiemann : curriculum vitae (probably written in summer 1945)

The historian Karin Hartewig assigns Thiemann's résumé to the few very early testimonies from the inner circle of prisoner functionaries. A copy of the document was found in a file that was created in October 1946 as part of a commission of inquiry set up by the SED Central Committee “on the behavior of some communists in the Buchenwald concentration camp”. This investigation, during which Thiemann was also questioned, focused on Ernst Busses activities in the camp. According to Karin Orth , the reports of the political ex-prisoners are to be interpreted as survival discourses that absolutized group-specific experiences as universally valid and tried to legitimize their own actions and survival. The inmate self-government was a far-reaching and influential client and patronage system. Karin Hartewig points out that Thiemann's justification for having killed on behalf of the party and in the service of a political mission has become fragile in view of the abysmal reality in the prisoner infirmary. The unspoken and actually chosen alternative to moral cleanliness and loss of power in the camp consisted in holding the position in the infirmary in order to save one's own comrades, but thereby becoming a murderer of fellow prisoners. The communist prison functionaries and members of the camp resistance found themselves exposed to hostility from former inmates due to this difficult and ambivalent situation after the liberation.

After the liberation, Thiemann was hired in May 1945 by the police forces created by the SMAD and head of the personnel department at the Chemnitz police headquarters . In July 1945 Thiemann feared being wanted by the American occupation forces and, like Arthur Dietzsch , Otto Kipp and other prison functionaries from Buchenwald in the Dachau Buchenwald trial , of being charged with crimes against humanity. The Saxon district leadership of the KPD helped him change his identity to Rolf Markert . Helmut Thiemann was listed as dead in 1945. Markert was born on September 3, 1911 and was transferred to Bautzen . In September 1945 he became cadre secretary of the KPD district leadership in Bautzen, in 1946 head of the personnel department of the state police authority of Saxony . From 1948 he headed the department K 5 ( political police ) of the State Criminal Police Office of Saxony . In August 1949 he was appointed deputy for operational tasks to the head of the Office for the Protection of Public Property Saxony. From October 1949, Markert headed Department VIIa ( VP readiness ) of the main administration for the protection of the national economy (from February 1950 MfS).

In 1951 he succeeded Hermann Gartmann as head of the Brandenburg state administration of the MfS, in 1952 head of Department IV ( counter-espionage ) of the MfS Berlin and in 1953 - as the successor to Gerhard Harnisch - head of the Dresden district administration of the MfS. Markert was also a member of the SED district leadership in Dresden from 1954 to December 1989. After the revolution in Zanzibar , he was the secret service advisor to the new government from March to August 1964. Zanzibar had decided the first non-socialist country, the GDR diplomatic recognition and at the same time asked the GDR to the posting of a security consultant. The MfS had selected Rolf Markert and, to start with, Markus Wolf too . Both arrived in Zanzibar on March 19, 1964 with a GDR delegation led by Deputy Foreign Minister Wolfgang Kiesewetter and were received by President Abeid Amani Karume and Vice President Abdullah Kassim Hanga . On September 26, 1969, he was appointed major general by the chairman of the GDR's National Defense Council , Walter Ulbricht . In 1981 Markert retired.

Surname

Thiemann was known by his real name in Buchenwald. In later GDR publications about Buchenwald he appeared under the name "Rolf Helmut". The spellings "Rolf Helmuth" and "Rolf Hellmuth" are also mentioned as pseudonyms. According to Lutz Niethammer , Thiemann had the code name "Rolf Markert" as early as the 1930s in the Soviet Union. In his activities in the GDR he was only known by this latter name.

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neues Deutschland , September 3, 1986, p. 2.
  2. ↑ Karin Hartewig: Helmut Thiemann, Rolf Markert and the prisoner infirmary in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism (1997), p. 259.
  3. ↑ Karin Hartewig: Wolf among wolves? The precarious power of the communist kapos in the Buchenwald concentration camp . In: Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, Christoph Dieckmann (eds.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps - Development and Structure . Volume I. Wallstein, Göttingen 1998, p. 946 f.
  4. ↑ a b Karin Hartewig: Helmut Thiemann, Rolf Markert and the prisoner infirmary in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism (1997), p. 257.
  5. ↑ Karin Hartewig: Helmut Thiemann, Rolf Markert and the prisoner infirmary in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (1997), p. 261. The report on Thiemann's interrogation is reprinted in Lutz Niethammer (ed.): Der “cleaned” Antifaschismus. The SED and the red kapos from Buchenwald . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1994, Document II.5.3: Interview Helmut Thiemann, p. 284f. Thiemann did not incriminate Busse, the investigation initially had no consequences for Busse.
  6. ↑ Karin Orth: Was there a warehouse company? “Criminals” and political prisoners in the concentration camp. In: Norbert Frei : Exploitation, Destruction, Public. New studies on National Socialist camp policy (= representations and sources on the history of Auschwitz. Vol. 4). Saur, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-598-24033-3 , pp. 109-133, here p. F.
  7. ↑ Philipp Neumann-Ther: The “International Committee Buchenwald-Dora and Commands (IKBD)”. On the history of a political active memory. In: Janine Doerry, Thomas Kubetzky, Katja Seybold (eds.): The social memory and communities of survivors. Bergen Belsen in comparative perspective Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1189-3 , p. 146.
  8. ↑ Karin Hartewig: Helmut Thiemann, Rolf Markert and the prisoner infirmary in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism (1997), p. 260.
  9. ^ Sächsische Zeitung of February 17, 1986.
  10. ↑ Markus Wolf: Chief of espionage in the secret war. Memories. List Verlag, 1997, p. 362f.
  11. ^ New Germany , September 27, 1969, p. 1.
  12. ↑ Ulrich Peters: Whoever loses hope has lost everything. Communist resistance in Buchenwald . PapyRossa, Cologne 2003 (= PapyRossa Hochschulschriften 47), p. 372 and 503; see also Lutz Niethammer (ed.): The 'cleaned' antifascism. The SED and the red kapos from Buchenwald . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1994, p. 275, footnote 74.
  13. ↑ Lutz Niethammer (ed.): The 'cleaned' anti-fascism. The SED and the red kapos from Buchenwald . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1994, p. 284 (footnote 107).
  14. ↑ Karin Hartewig: Helmut Thiemann, Rolf Markert and the prisoner infirmary in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (1997), pp. 255–270.
personal data
SURNAME Markert, Rolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thiemann, Helmut (real name); Hellmuth, Rolf (another pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD / SED), resistance fighter, major general of the MfS
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Werdau
DATE OF DEATH January 30, 1995
Place of death Berlin