Siegfried Rädel

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Siegfried Engelbert Martin Rädel (born March 7, 1893 in Copitz ; † May 10, 1943 in Brandenburg ) was a German politician , KPD member and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

The trained carpenter Rädel joined the SPD in 1912 . Siegfried Rädel became a soldier in 1913 at the age of 20. With his pioneer battalion, he experienced four years of war on the front lines and was wounded twice. Siegfried Rädel initially joined the USPD after the end of the war and was a member of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in Pirna during the November Revolution . In 1919 his colleagues elected him chairman of the works council in the artificial silk factory in Pirna, shortly afterwards he became a member of the KPD, in which he remained when the majority of the local party joined the KPD's left-wing split, the KAPD .

From 1921 he was a city councilor in Pirna and head of the KPD parliamentary group. From the same year he was a member of the central committee of the KPD, from 1924 to 1933 a member of the Reichstag . With interruptions he was a candidate or a member of the Central Committee of the KPD for many years .

Siegfried Rädel's work for alleviating the plight of those who were damaged by the floods in 1927 in the Gottleuba and Müglitz valleys between 1927 and 1932 and for his work for the construction of a dam system is well known. However, this system was only implemented between 1958 and 1974 (retention basins Buschbach, Liebstadt, Friedrichswalde-Ottendorf, Mordgrundbach and Glashütte, and the Gottleuba dam ). The Lauenstein flood retention basin was inaugurated in 2006.

Rädel's efforts to bundle social initiatives, forces and organizations led to the establishment of the Working Group of Social Policy Organizations (ARSO) on a national scale in 1927 . The ARSO with Rädel as publisher published the journal Proletarian Social Policy from May 1928 . Organ of the working group of socio-political organizations . Rädel was one of the German delegates to the World Peace Congress in Amsterdam in August 1928 .

After the transfer of power to Hitler in January 1933, Rädel took part in the illegal meeting of the Central Committee of the KPD on February 7, 1933 in the sports store Ziegenhals near Berlin and had to go into exile at the end of December 1933. His stations were Prague , France , the Soviet Union and Zurich . A party proceeding against him for "factional activity" was initiated and later ended with a simple reprimand.

The Swiss police arrested Rädel at the end of 1936 together with his partner Maria Weiterer , with whom he had lived and worked since 1927. In France, where he was deported, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the KPD, which was then based in Paris , made him head of the communist emigre organization. Siegfried Rädel took part in attempts to form an anti-fascist popular front , the Lutetia district , in France . Heinrich Mann , Lion Feuchtwanger , Rudolf Leonhard , Leonhard Frank and Paul Merker met in that circle of friends of German emigrants . At the " Bern Conference " of the KPD in Draveil near Paris in 1939 , he was elected to the 17-member Central Committee on the proposal of Wilhelm Pieck .

Rädel was arrested in Paris on September 1, 1939 and initially held in Santé prison and later in the Le Vernet internment camp. In the spring of 1941 he received Soviet citizenship, which should enable him to travel to the Soviet Union. In November 1941, Rädel was transferred to a prison in Castres together with Franz Dahlem . In August 1942, the Vichy regime handed Rädel over to the Gestapo . From October in the Moabit remand prison , he was sentenced to death by the People's Court on February 25, 1943 for high treason and beheaded in the Brandenburg prison on May 10, 1943 .

Siegfried Rädel had lived with his partner Maria Weiterer from 1927, with whom he had two sons: Helmut and Werner.

Commemoration

Memorial plaques on the Reichstag

The artificial silk mill in Pirna was named after Rädel during the GDR era; it was closed after the turnaround. The Ullersdorfer Platz in Dresden-Bühlau was renamed Siegfried-Rädel-Platz after 1945. In 1991 it got its old name back. In Heidenau and also in Pirna a street in the city center is named after Siegfried Rädel. It was renamed Tharandt after reunification. In Dresden-Klotzsche the 82nd POS was named after Siegfried Rädel. The Siegfried Rädel Memorial Run took place in Bad Gottleuba. Since 1992 one of the 96 memorial plaques for members of the Reichstag murdered by the National Socialists has been commemorating Rädel near the Reichstag in Berlin .

literature

  • Siegfried Rädel . In: Striving to the highest of humanity. Brief descriptions of the lives of Dresden worker functionaries and resistance fighters . Dresden 1959, pp. 9-24.
  • Siegfried Rädel. A life of struggle for the working class . Compiled by Helmut Rädel and Maria Weiterer. Edited by VEB Sächsisches Kunstseidenwerk Siegfried Rädel. Pirna n.d. (1963).
  • Erika Kücklich: Rädel, Rädel, Siegfried Enghelbert Martin . In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical Lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 372–373.
  • Siegfried Rädel . In: German resistance fighters 1933–1945. Biographies and letters . Volume 2. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 68-72.
  • Elfriede Fölster: Anyone who lived as a communist ... Siegfried Rädel . In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement (BzG). Berlin 1973, No. 6, pp. 1007-1016.
  • Elfriede Fölster: Siegfried Rädel . In: Karl-Heinz Leidigkeit (editorial director): Communists in the Reichstag. Speeches and biographical sketches . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1979, pp. 465-472 and pp. 351-364.
  • Elfriede Fölster, Maria Weiterer: Siegfried Rädel. From his life . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1980. (= History series )
  • Eckhard Hansen, Florian Tennstedt (Eds.) U. a .: Biographical lexicon on the history of German social policy from 1871 to 1945 . Volume 2: Social politicians in the Weimar Republic and during National Socialism 1919 to 1945. Kassel University Press, Kassel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7376-0474-1 , p. 156 f. ( Online , PDF; 3.9 MB).
  • Rädel, Siegfried . In: 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 .
  • Dieter Oelschlägel: Rädel, Siegfried , in: Hugo Maier (ed.): Who is who of social work . Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998 ISBN 3-7841-1036-3 , p. 486

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ His articles are recorded in Elfriede Fölster, Maria Weiterer: Siegfried Rädel , p. 171, footnote 82.
  2. ↑ http://www.etg-ziegenhals.de/
  3. ^ Franz Dalem: Foreword. In: Elfriede Fölster, Maria Weiterer: Siegfried Rädel , p. 9.
  4. ↑ Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation 1933-1945. Droste-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1991, ISBN 3-7700-5162-9 , pp. 446-450.
  5. ↑ Elfriede Fölster, Maria Weiterer: Siegfried Rädel , p. 177.
  6. ^ Farewell letter to his sons dated May 10, 1943. ( German resistance fighters 1933–1945. Biographies and letters . Volume 2, p. 71 f.)
  7. ^ Siegfried Rädel: Speech in the general political debate at the 63rd session of the fifth electoral period on August 30, 1932.
personal data
SURNAME Rädel, Siegfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rädel, Siegfried Engelbert Martin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), MdR, resistance fighter, workers' representative
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Copitz
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1943
Place of death Brandenburg prison