United climbing department
The United Climbing Department (VKA), also known as the Red Mountaineers , was founded as the Saxon state association of the Naturfreunde tourist association . The VKA was a resistance group in Germany during the time of National Socialism , which was made up of the ranks of the workers' movement and nature lovers and was particularly active in Saxon Switzerland and the Ore Mountains .
The United Climbing Department was founded in the 1920s as a league of left-wing mountaineers, to whom the athletic mastery of conquering difficult peaks and the proverbial mountain camaraderie were just as important as the political struggle against all reactionaries and especially against the looming danger of the fascist dictatorship.
Many Red Mountaineers were members of the KPD , like Erich Glaser (1901–1984) or Kurt Schlosser , more likely to the Thalmann wing or, like Käthchen Kozlecki nee. Hempel (1908–1978) and Wenzel Kozlecki (1906–1995), on the Trotskyist Left Opposition / International Communists of Germany (LO / IKD) .
After the seizure of power of the Nazis athletes came their good knowledge of the terrain in the illegal work as a frontier worker benefits. For example, pamphlets came across the Czech border into Germany or the persecuted were brought to safety across the border. With the help of a printing press hidden in the cave on Satan's head, an illegal newspaper was produced and distributed there, which was reminiscent of a copper plaque that was affixed there in GDR times and has now disappeared. All of these activities were associated with danger to life and limb, and members of the group were not infrequently arrested, sent to concentration camps , or murdered. It is said that none of the Red Mountaineers ever revealed any of their comrades during interrogation.
Some members of the group later emigrated. For some time Wenzel Kozlecki was Leon Trotsky's personal secretary in Mexico . He was later refused to return to the GDR as a “ Trotskyist ”, while schools and the Saxon mountaineering choir were named after Kurt Schlosser .
The history of the association was later processed in the GDR television series Rote Bergsteiger .
literature
- Barbara Weinhold: A Trotskyist mountaineering group from Dresden in the resistance against fascism. Cologne 2004, ISBN 3899001109 ( Download , PDF, 1.4 MB)
- Joachim Schindler; AKuBiZ (Hrsg.): Rote Bergsteiger-Unterwegs on their tracks in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Pirna, 2008
- Rudolf Hanke: Steep paths. (Novel) Aufbau-Verlag Berlin 1960
- Max Zimmering : Li and the red climbers (novel). Children's book publisher Berlin 1972
- Max Zimmering: Resistance group United Climbing Departments. Berlin 1948.
