Rudolf Margies

Rudolf Margie (* 25. February 1884 in Parchau , Kreis Jerichow, † 31 May 1937 probably in Moscow ) was a German Communist Party - functionary , victims of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union .

Life and activity

After attending school, Margies learned the trade of a carpenter . In 1904 he became a member of the Association of German Handlers (VDH) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Allegedly before 1914 he was sentenced to prison terms for various criminal offenses.

From 1914 to 1918 Margies took part in the First World War. During the November Revolution of 1918 he became a member of the USPD . In 1920 he switched to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in which he soon took over as a functionary.

In 1922 Margies was sentenced to fifteen years in prison after he had shot a police officer on Moltkemarkt during a KPD rally in Bochum . However, due to an amnesty, he was soon released. As an employee of the KPD's military-political apparatus (M-Apparat), he was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the State Court for the Protection of the Republic in the Leipzig Cheka Trial on April 22, 1925 . In communist circles, the judgment was heavily criticized as an expression of the “ class justice ” of the Weimar Republic. An attempt on August 23, 1928 to free him from prison in Gerthe (Bochum) failed after an auxiliary sergeant bribed to help escape reported the plan to the authorities.

At the 12th party congress of the KPD in 1929, Margies was elected to the party's honorary presidium in absentia. After he was released due to an amnesty in October 1930, the party took this as an opportunity for a big celebration in Essen .

In 1931 Margies traveled to the Soviet Union, where he attended the Comintern's M-School to train as a communist functionary. In the further course of the 1930s worked as a German teacher. He joined the CPSU .

On November 4, 1936, Margies was arrested by the Soviet secret service NKVD on the pretext that he belonged to the (actually nonexistent) " Hoelz-Wollenberg-Organization " . As part of the Stalin purges of the 1930s, he was charged with being a member of a terrorist Trotskyist group led by Erich Wollenberg and planning a bomb attack on Georgi Dimitrov before the military college of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was sentenced to death on May 31, 1937 and shot on the same day.

family

Margies was married to Stanislawa (* 1881). Like him, she was arrested in 1937 and is missing in the camps of the Soviet Gulag . The eldest son of the two, Rudolf Margies junior (* 1917 in Bochum), was executed like him in 1937 as part of the "purges". Another son Gerhard (* 1921) died in 1942 in a Soviet camp.

literature

• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 , p. 578 ( online ).