Si Mustapha-Müller

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Si Mustapha-Müller (born November 19, 1926 in Wiesbaden as Winfried Müller; † October 9, 1993 in Tamanrasset ) was a German-Algerian member of the Algerian liberation movement , who brought more than 4,000 mostly German-speaking foreign legionnaires to desert and to support this work Coordinated solidarity campaigns for Algerian independence in German-speaking countries. After the end of the Algerian War , he first worked in Algerian ministries and then founded and managed two Algerian national parks .

Life

Mustapha-Müller attended primary school in Oberstdorf for four years and then middle school. However, after one and a half years, he has to leave this school for financial reasons and return to primary school. After graduating, he became a laborer in a factory in Oberstdorf. In 1941 his mother moved with him to the nearby village of Götzens . In early May 1943 he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in Innsbruck; He gave various reasons for the reasons for his detention. He was then transferred first to the Reich Labor Service and then to the Navy. At the beginning of January 1944, Mustapha-Müller became a marine artilleryman on the Baltic Sea, but quickly ended up in a hospital in Kiel. Then he was transferred to a punitive battalion near the Polish Thorn . After violating the exit ban, he was reported for desertion and, due to a denunciation, also for undermining military strength . While being handed over to a court martial, he was able to flee near Gdansk and found a Red Army bridgehead . After lengthy interrogations, he was assigned to Willi Bredel , who was the representative of the National Committee for Free Germany , as a front-line helper and returned to Germany with the advancing Red Army .

Mustapha-Müller now called himself Mischa, posed as an Austrian and was sent to an Antifa school of the Red Army . He then worked as an instructor in Ukraine and Belarus in the care and repatriation of Austrian prisoners of war. One of the transports took him to Vienna, worked briefly in the editorial department of an Austro-Soviet magazine, and then returned to Tyrol. As a staunch communist who only had a suitcase full of Stalin books with him when he returned home and who also tried to bring former Nazis to justice, he did not go down well there and moved to Kleinmachnow in the Soviet occupation zone in 1947 . In January 1948 he became a member of the SED . Presumably he completed a nine-month study of social sciences under the code name Wilfried Mauser at the party college "Karl Marx" of the SED in Hakeburg near Kleinmachnow.

Then he worked for the KPD in Wiesbaden, but he was soon considered unreliable and was accused of various offenses, not least of all of Trotskyism . On January 9, 1951, the Wiesbaden district executive expelled him from the party.

Mustapha-Müller joined the (anti- Stalinist ) Independent Workers' Party of Germany (UAPD) founded in Worms in March 1951 , where he met his (short-term) wife, Sonja Klare (born January 30, 1928 in Aschaffenburg). The two married on January 12, 1952, but on April 10, 1952 the pregnant woman returned to Aschaffenburg. The marriage produced a son.

As the head of the State Secretariat of Hesse of the UAPD, which dissolved in September 1952, he falsified the nominations for a candidate for the party, which earned him a three-month prison sentence for falsifying documents. To avoid prosecution, he went to Yugoslavia for a while . According to journalist Klaus Polkehn , Müller told him that he was involved in the combat group against inhumanity and that he was closely known to its founder and leader, Rainer Hildebrandt . Müller wrote articles for newspapers and took part in the "escape aid for Czechoslovak Jews during the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia".

In 1954 Mustapha-Müller traveled to Paris, where he became a sympathizer of the Algerian National Liberation Front. According to documents in the Federal Archives , Mustapha-Müller took compressed material from an FLN courier during a raid on the metro and saved him from imminent arrest. Because of the observations made by the French secret service, he had to follow a police order that forced him to leave France by the end of 1956. Therefore, in coordination with the FLN, he left for Morocco in autumn 1956.

The repatriation service for foreign legionnaires

After his arrival in Morocco, Mustapha-Müller initially found no real employment in the ranks of the FLN. It was only his accidental assignment as an interpreter during the interrogation of deserted Foreign Legionnaires that led to the idea of ​​“ developing a project for these mercenaries as part of psychological warfare , similar to the model practiced by the Red Army against Germans”, which Mustapha-Müller based on his Participation in the National Committee for Free Germany was familiar. In October 1956 the Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (CNRA) decided to create a repatriation service for foreign legionnaires ("Service de Rapatriement des Legionaires Ètrangères") as the official agency of the FLN and under the command of Abdelhafid Boussouf . Mustapha-Müller became its director and was supported by another German from 1959: Mourad Kusserow (* 1939 - † 2019). The official headquarters of the organization was in Tetuan in the Villa Dar Brixa provided by Morocco . Mustapha-Müller also lived in a sparsely furnished room in this building.

The repatriation service, which was able to fall back on a network of supporters in German-speaking countries, including many porters , was able to return 4,111 legionnaires to their home country or another country ready to take them up to the official end of its work in September 1962 in the course of its six years of work help. These included over 2,700 soldiers from Germany, as well as over 400 each from Spain and Italy and over 100 from Hungary.

Life after the end of the war of liberation

During his work for the repatriation service, Mustapha-Müller survived many attacks on him by the French secret service, for example a letter bomb attack in March 1960. Before that, an attack on him in Meknes, Moroccan, is said to have been carried out in 1957 , and that evening in Frankfurt am Main He was shot at with a submachine gun in the street. His commitment to a free Algeria was rewarded by the new rulers in Algiers. In October 1962 he was given a position at a military authority and from November onwards a position in the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Tourism, whose boss was Abd al-Aziz Bouteflika , "an old and good friend of Mustapha". One of Mustapha-Müller's tasks was to stimulate tourism, especially that from West Germany.

Müller-Mustapha turned to Klaus Vack again “and suggested official contacts between the newly founded Algerian youth associations and the West German Federal Youth Council - a project that never came of anything because, true to the Hallstein doctrine, official contacts with governments, which also the GDR recognized, were not permitted. ”Keller reports on other activities, such as articles in Austrian socialist youth magazines in which he called for practical solidarity with Algeria, and he tried“ to use the existing networks of the repatriation service for the upcoming new tasks to use. This made him a central figure in the organization of a European solidarity conference, “Conference Européenne d'assistance non-governmental à l'Algerié”, which took place from June 15 to 19, 1963 at the Center Universitaire de Ben Aknoun. 150 representatives from ten European countries and delegates from the Socialist Youth International are gathered. "

In August 1963 Mustapha-Müller fell seriously ill and had to go to Madrid for treatment. When he flew back to Algiers at the end of September 1963, he was arrested on arrival. 48 hours after his arrest, he was expelled and put on a plane to Paris, where he did not stay but instead flew to Tetuan to find out the reasons for his deportation and to reverse it.

For Mustapha-Müller, however, there were no further negative consequences: In July 1964 he was granted Algerian citizenship and he got a job in the Ministry of Information ("Ministry for National Orientation"). In Erika Fehse's film it says that he worked there for 10 years and was responsible for the control and censorship of the German-language press.

Mustapha-Müller helped found the Algerian Ski Association and campaigned for the construction of ski huts, survived a serious skiing accident and in 1978 became director of the Djudjura National Park in Kabylia, which he founded . Si Mustapha apparently also had his last residence in this national park, in the area of Tikjda .

After his time in Djudjura National Park, Mustapha-Müller was Inspector General of all Algerian National Parks from 1983 to 1986. His last official position from 1986 to 1988 was the director of another national park that he founded, the Tassilin National Park . Then he produced a few more films together with the national forest institute.

At the beginning of the 1990s, after an examination by a Viennese heart specialist, he returned to Algeria and continued filming a documentary about the Ahaggar Mountains. He suffered a heart attack on October 9, 1993 and was buried in the Tassilin National Park, which he founded.

Works

literature

Works by Fritz Keller
further literature

Movies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Müller also called himself Mischa Müller-Samson or just Si Mustapha. Mustapha Muller is on his tombstone. Cf. Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability , p. 109
  2. ↑ Trying to trace Mustapha-Müller's life more precisely is a difficult undertaking. In his book about him, published in 2017, the Austrian historian Fritz Keller describes Mustapha-Müller as a notorious liar, "whose changing mimicry turns into ever new alter egos ". - Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability , p. 103 Si Mustapha had “gladly made a joke [.] Of deliberately lying to historians, journalists and filmmakers about his multifaceted life. Under these difficult conditions, fragmentary (auto) biographies and two documentary films full of contradicting claims and representations emerged. ”Keller's approach is to examine these previous works on Mustapha-Müller in the light of more recent archive material - mainly from the holdings of the Stasi records authority - to reevaluate in order to enable “an asymptotic approach to the truth (if there is any)”. - Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 8
  3. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 8
  4. ↑ Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability , p. 19
  5. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , pp. 20-21
  6. ↑ In Erika Fehse's film, it is doubted whether he actually went to the party college, an entry there was neither under his real name, nor under the alias or cadre name Mauser.
  7. ↑ According to Polkehn, who knew Mustapha-Müller personally, this party expulsion apparently took place earlier, namely while studying at the party college. This assessment is probably based on one of the many legends that Mustapha-Müller put into circulation about himself: “Müller later claimed that he was imprisoned in 1949 for“ Titoism ”and expelled to West Germany. None of this can be found in the Stasi files. Several informers, on the other hand, claimed that Müller had been locked up as a Russian agent by the Americans as early as 1948 and recruited for the American secret service while he was in custody. "(Fritz Keller: Winfried Müller alias Mustapha )
  8. ↑ Sonja Kläre is the daughter of the KPD functionary and resistance fighter Otto Kläre, who was still politically active as a city councilor for the KPD in Aschaffenburg after the Second World War. Sonja Kläre studied law after the Second World War. “Shaped by the solidarity of 'Rote Hilfe' and her father's earlier underground work, she was committed to the concerns of the workers and the disadvantaged. [..] She gave lectures on legal philosophy and was elected to the student council - on the express condition that she should not be elected just because she was a woman. In the first state examination, which she was determined to strive for after six semesters, she was the only woman. "(Wolfgang Kaup: When lawyers were still a male profession. Ms. Sonja Uth sets her own standards , in: Lawyers' Association for the Aschaffenburg Regional Court District eV (ed. ): 1948-1998 50 Years of the Lawyers' Association for the District Court of Aschaffenburg eV Aschaffenburg 1998, ISBN 3-87707-525-8 )
    Due to her marriage to Mustapha-Müller and her pregnancy, she initially did not go to the preparatory service. After her divorce from Mustapaha-Müller and a renewed marriage to the Aschaffenburg lawyer Ottmar Uth, she did her legal preparatory service and passed the second state examination in 1965. She was admitted to the bar in May 1966 at the age of 38.
    In Erika Fehse's film, she tells of her time with Mustapha-Müller, with whom she was in contact when he was in Morocco for a long time.
  9. ↑ Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability , p. 31
  10. ↑ Klaus Polkehn: The Mission of Si Mustapha , p. 32
  11. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 34
  12. ↑ According to Keller on behalf of the American secret service cf. Fritz Keller: A life on the verge of probability , p. 39, according to Leggewie as a result of his attempts to work as a journalist. Compare Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger , p. 91
  13. ↑ Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability , p. 41
  14. ↑ Klaus Polkehn: The Mission of Si Mustapha , p. 33
  15. ↑ a b Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 45
  16. ^ National Council of the Algerian Revolution , highest decision-making body of the FLN
  17. ↑ Khenifer Sid-Ali: The Federal Republic in the Shadow of the Algerian War , pdf-S. 148
  18. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 49
  19. ↑ Quoted from a document of the repatriation service printed by Khenifer Sid-Ali. ( The Federal Republic in the shadow of the Algerian War , pdf-p. 203)
  20. ↑ Khenifer Sid-Ali: The Federal Republic in the Shadow of the Algerian War , pdf-S. 203
  21. ↑ a b Si Mustapha-Müller - A short time of fame , film by Erika Fehse
  22. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger , p. 102
  23. ↑ Klaus Polkehn: Die Mission des Si Mustapha , p. 39. See also the SPIEGEL article: ROTE HAND. Death in the mail
  24. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 92
  25. ↑ Mustapha-Müller was lucky in that he was on the right side in the internal Algerian power struggles after independence. Polkehn describes the repatriation service as part of the Algerian secret service, which was subordinate to the FLN's high command for the troops in the border areas in Morocco and Tunisia. Its commander was Houari Boumedienne , who was one of the forces that overthrew the provisional government after a march on Algiers in November 1962 and helped Ahmed Ben Bella to be elected as Algeria's first president. In his work The Algerian Revolution , written anonymously in August 1962 , Si Mustapha-Müller had sided with this Boumedienne faction, which is also known as the Oujda Clan , and therefore probably escaped purification.
  26. ↑ a b Klaus Polkehn: The Mission of Si Mustapha , pp. 42–43
  27. ^ Fritz Keller: Winfried Müller alias Mustapha
  28. ↑ Claus Leggewie: Kofferträger , p. 103
  29. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , p. 94
  30. ↑ The information from Spiegel that he has been removed from his post, cf. DER SPIEGEL: Winfried Müller rejects Keller.
  31. ↑ DER SPIEGEL 47/1963 of November 20, 1963
  32. ↑ Polkehn described Mustapha-Müller in this interlude as an obvious victim of disputes between different Algerian intelligence factions and does not rule out that Mustapha himself was involved. Cf. Klaus Polkehn: Die Mission des Si Mustapha , p. 44
  33. ↑ Fritz Keller: A Life on the Edge of Probability , p. 99
  34. ↑ To the Djudjura National Park there is an article in the English language Wikipedia: Djurdjura National Park ; There is no reference to its founder there. But in the article by Malika Rahal: Into the Woods. The fight between terrorism and tourism in Algeria's Atlas Mountains , The Nation, March 31, 2015.
  35. ↑ In the article Tikjda there are references to Mustapha's activities there.
  36. ↑ O. Arbane: Algérie - Rachida Müller, fille de Si Mustapha “Il était un père doux et un amoureux de la nature” , July 27, 2017
  37. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , pp. 100-101
  38. ↑ Fritz Keller: A life on the edge of probability , pp. 108–110
  39. ↑ Homepage Erika Fehse
personal data
SURNAME Si Mustapha-Müller
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müller, Winfried (maiden name); Müller-Samson, Mischa; Si Mustapha; Muller, Mustapha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION political commissioner of the Algerian Liberation Movement; Founder and head of the Foreign Legionnaires Return Service
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1993
Place of death Tamanrasset