Rudolf Herrnstadt

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Rudolf Herrnstadt (right) in conversation with Walter Ulbricht (left in the picture). Photo from 1951

Rudolf Herrnstadt (born March 18, 1903 in Gleiwitz , † August 28, 1966 in Halle ) was a German journalist and communist politician .

Herrnstadt, who was forced by his father to work in a paper mill for two years after dropping out of his law degree , became a passionate communist very early on. He became a member of the KPD and worked for the Soviet military intelligence service GRU . In 1939 he emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he was active in the National Committee for Free Germany from 1944 . After the end of the Second World War, Herrnstadt returned to Berlin, was initially editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung in the GDR and was instrumental in founding the Berliner Verlag and the newspaper Neues Deutschland ( central organ of the party). From 1950 to 1953 he was a member of the Central Committee of the SED . He campaigned for democratization within the SED in the early 1950s, but lost the power struggle against Walter Ulbricht . In 1953, Herrnstadt and other opponents against Ulbricht lost their seat in the Politburo and Central Committee because of “anti-party faction formation” and in the same year also lost his position as editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland . In 1954 he was also expelled from the SED.

Life

youth

Rudolf Herrnstadt came from a Jewish family . His mother, Maria-Clara, came from a merchant family that had become prosperous after 1870. His father Ludwig Herrnstadt worked as a lawyer and notary in Gleiwitz, belonged - despite his legal work for various large companies - to the SPD since 1894 and was a city councilor in Gleiwitz. In a résumé for the Soviet military intelligence service, written around 1930, Rudolf Herrnstadt wrote that his father earned around 1200 marks a month, while the monthly salary of an Upper Silesian industrial worker fluctuated between 80 and 150 marks. That is why he describes his father as "a member of the Jewish sector of the upper bourgeoisie".

Herrnstadt attended the Catholic grammar school in Gleiwitz from 1912 to 1921 and began to study law in Berlin in 1921 and continued this in Heidelberg from March 1922 . In October 1922, Rudolf Herrnstadt informed his parents that he would not continue his studies but would work as a writer in the future. His father then forced him to work in the Upper Silesian pulp mills. Rudolf Herrnstadt worked there until the autumn of 1924 as a payroll clerk, cashier, store manager and most recently as a management secretary. In November 1924, Herrnstadt went to Berlin against his parents' wishes. He earned his livelihood from support payments from his parents as well as a teaching position for the Drei-Masken-Verlag, while at the same time he tried unsuccessfully as a freelance writer. From May 1928 he was employed by the Berliner Tageblatt, initially as an unpaid assistant editor, and from autumn 1928 as a technical editor. He was one of the journalists sponsored by Theodor Wolff and later became a foreign correspondent in Prague (1930), Warsaw (from 1931) and Moscow (three months in the summer of 1933). According to a report by Wolfgang Leonhards u. a. recognizable by the fact that while he was still working in the Soviet Union as the chief editor of the newspaper of the National Committee Free Germany he was noticed by addressing his subordinates as “you”.

In his résumé written for the GRU, Herrnstadt writes that he became a communist in the 1920s without being able to attribute this to a decisive individual event. On the other hand, he attributes his desire to join the KPD to several events in 1929 in which industrialists responded to demands of the workers for changed working conditions with lockouts. The KPD initially responded hesitantly to his application for admission. Towards the end of 1930, however, he was told that his admission would be approved. At the same time, however, he was advised to keep his position with the “bourgeois” Berliner Tageblatt in order to take advantage of this position for the party. Since July 1, 1931, the KPD has been calling him “illegal” under the code name Friedrich Brockmann .

exile

Herrnstadt remained in Warsaw as a correspondent for Prague newspapers until August 1939, where he also worked for the Soviet military intelligence service GRU together with Gerhard Kegel and Ilse Stöbe . After the Wehrmacht attacked Poland , he emigrated to the Soviet Union . During the Second World War he held a leading position in the political leadership of the Red Army . With the arrest of the Rote Kapelle he was exposed to the Gestapo and the other secret services. From the summer of 1943 he was delivered to the other German emigrants in the Hotel Lux in Moscow and worked as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Neue Zeit in the National Committee for Free Germany . In the spring of 1945 he was supposed to be the eleventh member of the Ulbricht group , but was struck off the list again because he was Jewish: the Soviet Union feared anti-Semitic reactions from the German population.

In the DDR

After the Second World War, Herrnstadt became editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung in the GDR from 1945 to 1949 and co-founder of the Berliner Verlag and New Germany . He was also a member of the Central Committee of the SED and a candidate for the Politburo from 1950 to 1953 .

As editor-in-chief, he always let New Germany follow the line set by Moscow. Even when this line took on anti-Semitic traits in connection with an alleged medical conspiracy in the Soviet Union , he did not deviate from it: On January 14, 1953, New Germany published biting attacks against allegedly “demoralized bourgeois Jewish nationalists” - as Herrnstadt was both upper-class and more Jewish Origin, he had to fear that he could soon also mean himself.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953 ; On June 2, the Soviet Union ordered the SED to adopt the New Course , which was intended to reverse or slow down the building of socialism in the GDR that had been accelerated since 1952 . Herrnstadt was initially skeptical of this course. When he complained to the new Soviet High Commissioner Vladimir Semyonov about the speed of the ordered change of course, he replied: “In 14 days you may no longer have a state.” Herrstadt now positioned himself within the Politburo together with the Minister for State Security Wilhelm Zaisser as Ulbricht's opponent. They had the head of the Soviet secret service Lavrenti Beria on their side, who after Stalin's death appeared to be the strong man of the USSR to come. On June 14, 1953, Herrnstadt had a critical report published in Neues Deutschland under the title It is time to put the mallet aside . The authors critically examined the dictatorial methods used by the SED to enforce the increase in standards in VEB Housing on June 30, 1953. Even if the article did not call for the raising of the norms to be withdrawn, it still acted like a beacon, as it showed that the policy of the Central Committee Chairman Walter Ulbricht was controversial even within the SED's closest circle of power.

Herrnstadt became a member of a “Politburo commission to develop proposals for organizational changes”, in which he and Zaisser openly criticized the bureaucratic and dictatorial leadership style of Ulbricht and Hermann Matern , who, as chairman of the Central Party Control Commission, was responsible for intra-party discipline. Herrstadt was also appointed to an editorial committee of the Politburo, which was supposed to formulate the new course of the party line until the next meeting of the Central Committee. The Soviet ambassador Ivan Ilyichev asked him, together with Zaisser Ulbricht, to call for a withdrawal from power:

“He's a sensible man, he'll understand. Well, and if he doesn't want to understand, tell us and we will take action. "

On June 16, 1953, the Central Committee approved the New Course co-formulated by Herrnstadt:

"It is about creating a German Democratic Republic that will find the approval of all honest Germans for its prosperity, its social justice , its legal security , its deeply national characteristics and its free atmosphere."

This is the only way to restore German unity . How serious Herrnstadt was about it is controversial in research: Klaus Schroeder does not believe that he and Zaisser wanted to question the leading role of the SED. Wilfried Loth, on the other hand, sees the declaration as an indication that the Soviet Union “did not want the GDR” and - as in the Stalin Notes of 1952 - would have preferred a neutral, democratic Germany.

But because the increase in norms was not withdrawn, the New Course could no longer stop the uprising of June 17, 1953 . After its bloody suppression by the Soviet Army , Herrnstadt and Zaisser continued their work on the dismantling of Ulbricht. On June 26th, the organizing commission developed a new leadership concept for the party: instead of the all-powerful general secretary at the top, there should be collective leadership. At Herrnstadt's request, Ulbricht was ready to relinquish the leadership of the party. On the night of July 7th to 8th, 1953, Herrnstadt presented the Commission's proposals to the Politburo. Zaisser, Friedrich Ebert , Heinrich Rau and Elli Schmidt agreed with him; only Matern and Erich Honecker spoke for Ulbricht . Ulbricht accused Herrnstadt of “forming factions” and “ social democratism ” - both of which had been a serious violation of party discipline since the SED had changed into a new type of party in 1948/49 - but declared that he was ready to resign again: “Well, if everyone See it that way, please, I'm not sticking to the post ”. However, the Politburo did not take a formal decision to dismiss.

The following day Ulbricht went to Moscow . Beria was overthrown and arrested there on June 26th. Nikita Sergejewitsch Khrushchev , the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU , and Prime Minister Georgi Malenkov supported Ulbricht. With this backing, Ulbricht appeared before the SED Central Committee plenum on July 24, 1953, and presented a text that was not discussed with the Politburo. As the cause of the “fascist putsch ” (the GDR's official name for the uprising of June 17, 1953), he proposed the New Course and attacked Herrnstadt, which he accused of “directly supporting the strikers”. He constructed a direct link between the “Herrnstadt-Zaisser faction” and the overthrown Beria, whose alleged “capitulist attitude […] must have led to the restoration of capitalism .” Therefore, the other Politburo members did not dare to protest. Members thought the text had been agreed.

After the plenary session, a journalistic campaign orchestrated by Ulbricht's colleague Karl Schirdewan began against Herrnstadt and Zaisser, who were publicly described as “ Trotskyists ” and “enemies of the German people and the party of the working class”. On July 26, 1953, Herrnstadt and the other opponents against Ulbricht lost their seat in the Politburo and Central Committee because of “anti-party faction formation ”. In the same year he also lost his position as editor-in-chief of New Germany . Herrnstadt admitted all the allegations made against him and exercised self-criticism of the Central Party Control Commission . On January 23, 1954, he was also expelled from the SED. Until the end of his life, he worked as a research assistant in the German Central Archives, Historical Department II in Merseburg , insofar as a serious lung disease allowed him .

School essays for Wilhelm II.

In the central archive, Herrnstadt discovered four essays that primary school students at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium had written in 1901 on the subject of the leg position of the monuments in Siegesallee . Kaiser Wilhelm II , who commissioned the Berlin Monumental Boulevard , personally assessed these essays - in some cases very different from the teachers' censorship - and provided them with marginal comments. The essays were kept under lock and key in the Hohenzollern Museum and then long forgotten. Herrnstadt published the essays in 1960 under the pseudonym RE Hardt with the title The legs of the Hohenzollern (see The leg position of the monuments in Siegesallee ).

His daughter is the writer Irina Liebmann .

Fonts

  • Free Germany, organ of the National Committee “Free Germany” . Editor-in-chief, 3 years, at least 50 issues, Moscow 1943–1945.
  • About "the Russians" and about us. In preparation for the SED party conference in Berlin. In: New Germany. Berlin 1948.
  • The way of the east zone. With an appendix. Refugees from West Germany speak . State Board of the KPD Hamburg, Hamburg 1949.
  • The way to the German Democratic Republic. Dietz , Berlin 1950, 27 pages (4th edition 1951).
  • Colleague Zschau and Colleague Brumme. Dietz, Berlin 1951 (SED agitation brochure against worker resistance).
  • The development of Berlin in the light of the great perspective - building socialism. Contribution to the discussion at the 2nd party conference of the SED, Berlin, 9. – 12. July 1952. Dietz, Berlin 1952.
  • The first conspiracy against the international proletariat. On the history of the Cologne Communist Trial in 1852 . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1958.
  • The discovery of the classes. The history of the term class from its beginnings to the eve of the July Revolution in Paris in 1830. Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1965.
  • In addition, at least two works under a pseudonym from the time of his deportation to Merseburg, including as RE Hardt:
    • RE Hardt: The legs of the Hohenzollern. (= History in your pocket. 1). Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1960.

literature

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Herrnstadt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Irina Liebmann: Would it be nice? It would be nice! P. 42.
  2. ↑ Irina Liebmann: Would it be nice? It would be nice! P. 22.
  3. ↑ Hans Coppi , Sabine Kebir : Ilse Stöbe: Again in office. A resistance fighter on Wilhelmstrasse . VSA, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-89965-569-8 , p. 23.
  4. ↑ a b c Irina Liebmann: Would it be nice? It would be nice! P. 43.
  5. ^ A b c Wolfgang Leonhard: The revolution dismisses its children. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1955, ISBN 3-462-01463-3 , p. 292 ff.
  6. ↑ Irina Liebmann: Would it be nice? It would be nice! Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8333-0618-1 , p. 44.
  7. ↑ Irina Liebmann: Would it be nice? It would be nice! Pp. 48-49.
  8. ↑ Coppi / Kebir, p. 25.
  9. ↑ Kerstin Decker: The 416 pages of your father . In: Der Tagesspiegel . March 15, 2008. Accessed February 19, 2018.
  10. ↑ Wilfried Loth : Stalin's unloved child. Why Moscow didn't want the GDR. Rowohlt, Berlin 1994, p. 195.
  11. ↑ Elke Scherstjanoi: “In 14 days you may no longer have a state”. Vladimir Semenov and June 17, 1953. In: Germany Archives . 31, 1998, pp. 907-937.
  12. ^ Siegfried Grün, Käthe Stern: It's time to put the mallet aside. In: New Germany. dated June 14, 1953, online on a website of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , accessed on December 21, 2010.
  13. ↑ Klaus Schroeder : The SED state. History and structures of the GDR. Bavarian State Center for Political Education, Munich 1998, p. 122.
  14. ↑ Nadja Stulz-Herrnstadt (ed.): The Herrnstadt-Dokument. The Politburo of the SED and the story of June 17, 1953. Reinbek 1990, p. 79, quoted from Wilfried Loth: Stalins unloved child. Why Moscow didn't want the GDR. Rowohlt, Berlin 1994, p. 206 f.
  15. ↑ a b Wilfried Loth: Stalin's unloved child. Why Moscow didn't want the GDR. Rowohlt, Berlin 1994, p. 206.
  16. ↑ Wilfried Loth: Stalin's unloved child. Why Moscow didn't want the GDR. Rowohlt, Berlin 1994, pp. 205-217 and passim.
  17. ^ Dierk Hoffmann, Karl-Heinz Schmidt, Peter Skyba (eds.): The GDR before the Wall was built. Documents on the history of the other Germany 1949–1961. Munich 1993, p. 174 ff.
  18. ↑ Klaus Schroeder: The SED state. History and structures of the GDR. Bavarian State Center for Political Education, Munich 1998, p. 126 ff; Irina Liebmann : Would it be nice? It would be nice! My father Rudolf Herrnstadt. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 353 (here the quote).
  19. ↑ Nadja Stulz-Herrnstadt (ed.): The Herrnstadt-Dokument. The Politburo of the SED and the history of June 17, 1953. Reinbek 1990, p. 140.
  20. ↑ Nadja Stulz-Herrnstadt (ed.): The Herrnstadt-Dokument. The Politburo of the SED and the history of June 17, 1953. Reinbek 1990, p. 190.
  21. ^ Declaration to the Central Party Control Commission dated August 31, 1953 online on a website of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, accessed on January 4, 2010.
  22. ↑ Volker Klimpel : Sauerbruch and Ulbricht. In: Würzburg medical history reports. 23, 2004, p. 424.
  23. ↑ Review
personal data
SURNAME Herrnstadt, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and politician (KPD, SED), MdV
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Gliwice
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1966
Place of death Hall