Rudi Wetzel

Rudolf Paul Wetzel (born January 10, 1909 in Rechenberg , Erzgebirge , † August 31, 1992 in Berlin ) was a German journalist.

Life

Early years

Wetzel was the son of a decoration and furniture painter. After attending elementary school and the Freiherrlich von Fletcher's advanced school in Dresden, he studied pedagogy at the Technical University of Dresden from 1929 .

In 1930 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1931 he switched to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In this he took on functionaries as chairman of the Communist Student Union in Dresden.

In 1934 Wetzel was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for being involved in the communist underground movement against the Nazi regime. After serving his time in prison, he was transferred to the Sachsenburg concentration camp . Shortly after his release from the same, he fled abroad in 1937. He reached Sweden via Budapest, Paris, London and Hull.

Life in the Swedish Emigration (1940–1946)

In Sweden, Wetzel settled in Gothenburg and Jönköping . He worked as an electric welder and became a member of the Swedish Metalworkers' Association after he had already received his training in Great Britain.

After his emigration to Sweden, Wetzel was classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles - where he was mistakenly suspected - should be located and arrested by the Wehrmacht from the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS with special priority.

In 1940, Wetzel, as the author of the "Gothenburg Resolution" directed against the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939, was in opposition to the leadership of the KPD in exile in Moscow . In the resolution, Wetzel declared that despite this treaty, Hitler and his system, and not the imperialist powers France and Great Britain, must continue to be the main enemy of the German workers. Walter Ulbricht then instructed the Communists in Sweden to isolate Wetzel ("hang out").

In 1942 Wetzel moved to Stockholm. From 1943 onwards, as a result of the changed political constellation that resulted from the beginning of the German-Soviet war with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and which made his criticism of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact irrelevant, he was also involved in party work again active: He became the editorial secretary of the communist magazine Politische Information, published in Stockholm, and also wrote numerous articles for it under pseudonyms such as "Ber Wernau", "Karl Scharf" and "Max Richter".

Life in the Soviet Zone / GDR (1946–1965)

In January 1946 Wetzel returned to Germany, where he settled in the Soviet occupation zone . He was given a position as main advisor in the press and radio department of the Central Committee of the SED . In 1947 he became head of the foreign press office (2nd deputy head of the agitation department).

From 1950 to 1953 Wetzel was editor-in-chief of the SED official newspaper Neuer Weg . At the same time he became a member of the Presidium of the International Organization of Journalists.

In early 1953, Wetzel was briefly editor-in-chief of the magazine Friedenspost . A few months later, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the new magazine Wochenpost published by the Central Committee of the SED . Also in 1953, he succeeded Karl Bittel as chairman of the Association of the German Press (VDP), of which he was also a member.

In March 1957, Wetzel was deposed by the SED leadership both as editor-in-chief of the Wochenpost and as chairman of the VDP and ousted from the Berlin publishing house . The background for this measure was his rebellion against the information policy of the GDR government: In particular, Wetzel had aroused the displeasure of the SED leadership because of his criticism of their attitude to the popular uprisings in Poland and Hungary in 1956, which was above all in one of him and his editorial board on October 27, 1956, had put down a letter to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED, in which the weekly mail editors demanded "truthful information" and adherence to "Lenin's norms of party and state life" . As a result, he was severely disgraced at meetings of the Central Committee press department. To make matters worse, Walter Ulbricht resented Wetzel for his (Ulbricht's) wish to backtrack and, in return for the letter of October 1956, an article on the subject of "freedom of the press" for the SED central organ, which was on the line of the Central Committee To write New Germany , had refused. Wetzel's refusal to comply with Ulbricht's request meant, according to Jürgen Wilke, de facto that he failed in a "practical test" of his loyalty to the SED leadership and personally provoked the SED leader. This inevitably followed the instruction to resign his position as editor-in-chief as well as the chairmanship (and membership of the presidium) in the VDP or to ask the VDP presidium to release him from his functions.

In the following years, Wetzel, who from then on was considered a persona non grata by the government of the GDR , worked in subordinate journalistic positions: In June 1957 he became editor of the Illustrierte Freie Welt , but in February 1958 he left the publishing house without notice due to ideological deficiencies Dismiss culture and progress . In 1959 he found an editor's position at Urania magazine . He also wrote for magazines such as Knowledge and Life .

Later years

In 1965 Wetzel became a freelance science journalist. He wrote for the Swedish trade union newspaper Grafis , but he also published reports in numerous GDR magazines that reached a wide readership. As an accredited journalist, he was also able to travel to the West.

Since 1968 at the latest, Wetzel has been under constant surveillance by the Ministry for State Security .

As a friend of the regime critic Rudolf Bahro , Wetzel was involved in the editing of his book Die Alternative from 1975 to 1977 . Although as a lecturer he played a major role in the criticism of actually existing socialism formulated in this work, he was only interrogated a few times by the Stasi after Bahro's arrest (his wife also lost her job at the GDR Academy of Sciences ), but was himself neither arrested nor tried. In the literature it is mostly assumed that the SED leadership deliberately spared him in order to give the impression that the critic Bahro was a loner or to avoid the impression that behind Bahro there was a larger network of critical communists, as this would have increased the significance of his criticism in the perception of the population and abroad or would have been suitable to arouse doubts about the political unity of the GDR population.

Otherwise, the Damnatio memoriae imposed on Wetzel in East Germany lasted until 1990. The GDR newspapers remained silent about his 80th birthday in January 1989, which was honored in West Germany by newspapers such as the Frankfurter Rundschau , which presented the communist nonconformist and lateral thinker with a commemorative article under the maxim "Head up and down." not the hands "paid tribute.

On January 25, 1990, Wetzel was rehabilitated by the extraordinary congress of the Association of German Journalists. In the same year he joined the PDS - in his own words "out of solidarity" .

Fonts

• The man in the loden coat: stories from the thirties . New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1978.

literature

• Gabriele Baumgartner, Dieter Hebig (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ / DDR. 1945–1990. Volume 2: Maassen - Zylla. KG Saur, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-598-11177-0 , p. 1003.
• Jochen Cerný: Who was who - DDR , 1992, p. 484.
• Eberhard Funk: The German League for the United Nations , 1998, p. 320.
• Klaus Polkehn: That was the weekly post: history and stories of a newspaper , 1997.
• Michael F. Scholz : Would you like some Scandinavian experience? Post-exile and remigration. The former KPD emigrants in Scandinavia and their further fate in the Soviet Zone / GDR. 2000.
• Ders .: "Rudi Wetzel - fate of a former emigrant from Sweden in the Soviet Zone / GDR", in: Exil , Vol. 12 (1992), No. 2, pp. 53-66.
• Jürgen Wilke: Journalists and Journalism in the GDR. Professional organization - Western correspondents - "The Black Channel" , passim, esp. P. 52.

Web links

• Short biography of Wetzel on the website of the Federal Foundation for Coming to terms with the SED dictatorship

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Wetzel on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in Berlin). .