Travail allemand

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Travail allemand ( TA , German  German work ), also "Travail antifasciste allemand" or "Travail Anti-Allemand" was a sector of the Resistance , which after the invasion of German troops in France in spring 1941 by the Central Committee (ZK) of the Parti communiste français (KPF) was created. It included all German-speaking members of the Main-d'Oeuvre immigrée (MOI) organization founded in 1924 , which was also commissioned by the KPF to manage the TA. In 1942/43 it became part of the French National Front . The TA was headed by a head of three (triangle), who had consisted of the following people since the end of 1941: Franz Marek ( KPÖ ), Otto Niebergall ( KPD ) and Artur London ( Czechoslovak KP ).

Environment in France around 1940

In the 1930s there were around 30,000 German and German-speaking emigrants living in France. Among them were several thousand volunteers who had fought for the Spanish Republic , many artists, many scientists, many Jews and other racially persecuted, many bourgeois democrats, trade unionists and persecuted politicians.

With the occupation of France by the Wehrmacht after the defeat of the French Republic in May 1940, which had been preceded by the seat war and the Western campaign , these emigrants were extremely threatened. Many tried to flee, some also committed suicide, many went underground, tried to survive and began resisting the occupying power in various ways. In this situation the Travail allemand was founded as a special fighting organization of the Resistance, which included thousands of German-speaking underground fighters, but also underground fighters from practically all countries in Europe.

activity

The aim of the work of the TA was to penetrate the fascist war machine and to fight the fascist ideology of the soldiers through anti-fascist enlightenment and to work for the idea of ​​peace in the German army, the service and administrative organs.

The activities of the TA were divided mainly into the following areas: a) "Inter" = interregional instructors. There were about a dozen Inter (including ten Austrians), who had the task, in conjunction with the TA management (Paris) and the French regional managers, in strategically important regions (especially in northern France and on the Atlantic coast), the so-called "built-in" to supervise and supply illegal material. b) The installed workers were mostly employed as interpreters, either at civilian offices of the German occupying power (e.g. "Organization Todt") or in Wehrmacht facilities, e.g. at military airfields, military training areas, soldiers' homes, etc.

The most important bases of the Austrian "built-in" were in Bordeaux , Lille and Boulogne-sur-Mer . German resistance fighters only played a very subordinate role here. Furthermore, the almost exclusively Jewish women who were employed in the so-called "girl work" were an integral part of the TA. They appeared as Alsatians in order to find a plausible explanation for their knowledge of German and French. The members of the girls' group (mostly traveling in pairs) approached German Wehrmacht soldiers, involved them in conversations and sounded out whether they were accessible to anti-fascist propaganda. In the positive case, they gave them underground newspapers, such as the soldier in the west . The Soldier in the West was written almost exclusively by Franz Marek after the arrest of the first editor (Hans Zipper, Austrian fighter in Spain) and was reproduced in the apartment of an Austrian resistance fighter in Paris. It appeared at times with an edition of 60,000 copies per issue. Finally, the TA also included the activities of the so-called "scatter groups", which for safety reasons mostly appeared in groups of three to four people. Their actions took place partly in secret, partly in public. A particularly spectacular variant consisted of throwing hundreds of leaflets from moving trams during the day and jumping off at lightning speed.

After the occupation of southern France by the Wehrmacht (November 1942), a separate TA management was established in Lyon , led by the Austrians Oskar Grossmann and Paul Kessler. Under their aegis, the underground magazine Soldat am Mediterranean was created .

Between November 1943 and August 1944, the TA was broken up due to the close cooperation between the French police, the security police (Paris, Lyon) and the Vienna Gestapo. Some Viennese Gestapo officials had already been temporarily summoned to Paris in November 1943. The Vienna Gestapo played an important role because from November 1942 a number of Austrian resistance fighters in France, also disguised as Alsatians, had returned to Austria and courier connections for these resistance fighters existed between Vienna and Paris or Lyon.

Almost a hundred people were arrested by Austrian TA activists (according to Franz Marek). There were eleven of the Germans.

The territorial field of activity of the TA extended to Belgium (especially Brussels and Antwerp), but where there was no own management. The connections between Paris and Brussels were maintained by Marek's partner Tilly Spiegel , and later by the Austrian fighter Gustav Teply.

Reception history

The reception of the share of German-speaking exiles in the French Resistance was dominated almost exclusively by GDR historiography until 1990, the core statements of which in some publications survived the end of the GDR and in some cases still shape the view of this component of the resistance today, for example in Ulla Plener or Stefan Doernberg . Historical errors and distortions in the GDR also shaped the representations of the TA. For example, Franz Marek, who was expelled from the KPÖ in 1970, was stamped “non-person” in the GDR and his leading position in the TA was not mentioned with any syllable. Furthermore, the history of the origins of the TA (like the communist resistance in France as a whole) was postponed to summer or autumn 1940 in order to conceal the devastating effects of the Hitler-Stalin pact and to suggest a continuity of the resistance. The fact that the Austrian part of the TA has been completely marginalized, but the part of German communists has been exaggerated, must also be regarded as remarkable.

literature

  • Tanja von Fransecky: To the mouth of the beast. Nelly Klein - an Austrian Jew in the Belgian resistance. (= Publications of the Silent Heroes Memorial Center , Volume 8). Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-86331-444-6 .
  • Maximilian Graf u. a .: Franz Marek - A European Marxist. The biography. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2019. ISBN 978385476-690-2 .
  • Maximilian Graf, Sarah Knoll (Ed.): Franz Marek. Profession and calling communist: Memoirs and key texts. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2017. ISBN 978385476-659-9 .
  • Claude Collin: The "Travail allemand", an organization de resistance au sein de la Wehrmacht. Articles et témoignages. Les Indes Savantes, Paris 2013. ISBN 978-2-84654-352-1 .
  • Claude Collin: The "Travail allemand": origines et filiations. In: Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 2008/2 (numéro 230).
  • Stéphane Courtois , Denis Peschanski, Adam Rayski: Le sang de l'étranger. Les immigrés de la MOI dans la résistance , Paris, Arthème, Fayard, 1989. ISBN 978-2213018898 .
  • Josef Meisel : Now we have you, Meisel! Fight, resistance and persecution of the Austrian anti-fascist Josef Meisel (1911-1945). Vienna 1985. ISBN 978-3900351434 .
  • Dolly Steindling: My youth. A report. Wiener Verlag 1990.
  • Dolly Steindling: Hitting Back: An Austrian Jew in the French Resistance (Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture). 2000
  • Karlheinz Pech : On the side of the Resistance. On the struggle of the 'Free Germany' movement for the West in France (1943–1945). Military publisher of the GDR: Berlin 1974
  • Dora Schaul (Ed.): Resistance. Memories of German anti-fascists. 3rd edition, Dietz-Verlag: Berlin 1985, in particular Otto Niebergall : The anti-fascist German resistance struggle in France - its direction and development. Pp. 21-58
  • Éveline Brès and Yvan Brès: Un Maquis d'antifascistes allemands en france. Languedoc / Chaleil: Montpellier 1987
  • Stefan Doernberg (ed.): In league with the enemy. Germans on the Allied side. Dietz Verlag GmbH Berlin, 1995. 384 pp., 22 ills., ISBN 3-320-01875-2 .
  • Roland Pfefferkorn (ed.): La résistance allemande contre le nazisme (actes du colloque de Strasbourg (18-19 mars 1997)). 2nd ed., Rev. et corr. Strasbourg: Association Nationale des Ancients Combattants de la Résistance, Comité régional Alsace.

Movies

  • France's foreign patriots - Germans in the Resistance. Director: Wolfgang Schoen, Frank Gutermuth, Germany 2006, 53 min.
  • Du travail allemand au travail de memoire - Gerhard Leo, a German in the Resistance , Bodo Kaiser, Germany 2003, 60 min.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Éveline Brès and Yvan Brès: Un Maquis d'antifascistes allemands en France . Languedoc / Chaleil: Montpellier 1987, p. 29.
  2. ↑ Heike Bungert: The National Committee and the West . Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997, ISBN 978-3-515-07219-9
  3. ^ Karlheinz Pech: On the side of the Resistance. On the struggle of the 'Free Germany' movement for the West in France (1943-1945). Military publishing house of the GDR: Berlin 1974, p. 35.
  4. ^ Exhibition "Germans in the Resistance" Organizer: Verband DRAFD eV , First opening: 1995
  5. ^ On Marek's leading activity in TA cf. Maximilian Graf among others: Franz Marek - A European Marxist. The biography. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2019, p. 78ff.
  6. ↑ According to an annual report by Otto Niebergall, the Federal Archives in Berlin in the estate of Franz Dahlem is present
  7. ↑ Ulla Plener (Ed.): Women from Germany in the French Resistance. Bodoni, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-929390-80-9 .
  8. ^ Stefan Doernberg: In league with the enemy. Germans on the Allied side . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 978-3-320-01875-7 .
  9. ↑ Book announcement