Rudolf Möller-Dostali

Otto Carl Rudolf Möller-Dostali (born April 1, 1892 in Wiesbaden-Biebrich ; † January 24, 1961 in Essen ) (code name Otto Richthofer) was a German political functionary (KPD, SPD).

Life and activity

Möller-Dostali was a son of the telegraphist Johann Georg Möller and his wife Amalie, nee. Teaching After attending school, he learned the painting trade and then practiced his profession at a shipyard . In 1911 he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He eventually turned to journalism and worked for several social democratic papers.

In 1913 Möller-Dostali went to Brazil , where he worked for an international press office in São Paulo . After the First World War he returned to Germany, where he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1920 . For this year he edited the newspaper Arbeiterzeitung in Bielefeld for some time under the pseudonym Otto Richthofer .

From August 1925 to October 1926 Möller-Dostali acted as secretary of the KPD in the Bielefeld subdistrict , after which he moved to the KPD district leadership in Hanover as a polling officer (until 1930) for the Lower Saxony district . Acting at the time, he was controversial because of his opaque past. The party's internal opposition attacked him mainly because he defended the line of the Central Committee (ZK) against the left in Lower Saxony and then against the group of so-called "Compromisers".

In 1930 Richthofer became secretary of the Comintern's Western European Office . In 1931 party proceedings were initiated against him, about the slow progress of which he complained to the Central Committee in 1932. After a brief activity in the Soviet trade agency in Berlin in 1932, he became a member of the press department of the Central Committee. Activities for the communist international press correspondence took him to Spain, France, Belgium and the Balkans.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Richthofer was the head of the illegal Red Aid in Berlin-Brandenburg from 1933 to July 1934, before he fled to Prague to avoid arrest , where he temporarily headed a group of emigrants .

Richthofer resigned from the KPD in December 1934, after he had turned to Catholicism in the course of 1934 and converted to Catholicism at the end of the year. Under the influence of the encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931), he developed ideas of a broad correspondence between democratic socialism and Christian humanism. In the following years he participated in the founding of the Christian Reich Association for German Freedom and has since published the Christian Freedom Letters. In 1937 he participated with the People's Socialist Movement, the Black Front and other Christian and national revolutionary groups in the signing of the German Front's appeal against the Hitler regime on January 10, 1937. In April of the same year he was a participant in the conference of the Preparatory Committee for the establishment of the German People's Council in Pressburg .

In February 1938 Möller-Dostali became editor -in- chief of the Christian-social newspaper Abendland, which was published once with the collaboration of the Jesuit Friedrich Muckermann . In 1938 he fled to Great Britain, where he joined the SPD in 1942. In the same year he became a board member of the Catholic Working Group for Politics and Economy in London and a member of the national group of German trade unionists in Great Britain. In 1944 he was elected to the board of the Association of German Social Democrats. He published a regular information service, which was mainly intended for the Germans in South America . In 1945 Möller-Dostali became a member of the advisory commission of the trade union group as a representative of the SPD.

In 1946 Möller-Dostali returned to Germany. In January 1948 he took over the office of editor-in-chief of the DGB- owned federal publishing house, he also became editor-in-chief of the organ of the DGB youth upwards . In October 1948 he left the Bundes Verlag on suspicion of being a Communist agent, to which he responded with a counterclaim. In 1949 he took over the foreign policy editing of the Neue Ruhr Zeitung . After his return, he was first managing director and then chairman of the Siegkreis sub-district in the SPD. In May 1948 he became a member of the board of the Upper Rhine district in Essen. From 1952 to 1958 he was finally at the head of the SPD sub-district of Essen. At the same time he was the foreign policy editor of the Neue Ruhr-Zeitung .

family

In 1945 Möller-Dostali married for the first time in London. In 1952 he married Berta Labudat (1909-2001) from Essen, who has been a city councilor for the SPD since 1948 and under her married name Berta Möller-Dostali from 1954 to 1965 managing director of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt in the Niederrhein district, from 1965 to 1973 managing director of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt- Essen district association and from 1968 to 1979 she was mayor of Essen.

Web links

• Short biography of Möller-Dostali on the website of the Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Regime (excerpt from the Handbook of the German Communists)

Fonts

• Socialism and Catholicism , 1947.

literature

• Werner Röder / Herbert A. Strauss : German Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 , Vol. I (Politics, Economy, Public Life), Munich 1980, p. 505., ISBN 0-89664-101-5
• Franz Menges / Eberhard Flessing: "Möller-Dostali, Rudolf" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie Vol. 17 (1994), pp. 652f.