Viktor Priess

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Viktor Priess (* 21st July 1908 in Hamburg , † 23. November 1999 ) was a German Communist , Comintern -Funktionär and GRU - Agent and member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War .

Life

Priess learned the trade of a mechanical engineer. He was a member of the KPD from 1925 and began to work in the military-political area ( M-Apparat ) of his party in 1928 . In 1930/31 he attended a course at the Comintern school in Moscow and then became one of the bodyguards of the KPD chairman Ernst Thalmann . One of his tasks in the M-Apparat was to secure the Soviet arms deliveries to China that were handled in Hamburg. Since direct deliveries for the Red Army in China were not possible, the weapons were shipped via the port of Hamburg and declared there as agricultural machines.

At Christmas 1933 Priess emigrated to Oslo . He had traveled as a stowaway on a Norwegian mail ship and suffered severe frostbite on his legs. At one of the last meetings of the M apparatus , Hans Kippenberger commissioned him to observe Walter Ulbricht's environment in the KPD foreign organizations . This, and the fact that he had no official party mandate to flee Hamburg, led to his being expelled from the KPD in Copenhagen.

In late 1936 he traveled to Spain to support the International Brigades . There he led a partisan group and Franz Dahlem made sure that he was accepted back into the KPD. After the defeat of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, he fled to France in 1939 and was interned there. He later managed to escape to Algiers and became a member of the British Army during the fighting in Africa .

After the German troops had been driven from the North African theater of war, he drove with 30 other Spanish fighters to the Soviet Union , where he worked in a special unit of the military intelligence service GRU , until he was expelled from the KPD again at the insistence of Walter Ulbricht and deported to Siberia .

Because of the internal party disputes and his contacts with Kippenberger, he was sentenced to death in March 1947 for anti-Soviet activity. A few weeks later, the Soviet Union abolished the death penalty and the sentence was commuted to 25 years of labor camp . He was only able to leave Vorkuta with the late returnees who were prisoners of war . Since his mother lived in Hamburg, he went to his hometown, where he went back to his old job and was only involved in IG Metall .

The verdict was overturned in 1956, but Viktor Priess was not rehabilitated by the Russian Federation until 1991 .

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personal data
SURNAME Priess, Viktor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist, Comintern and GRU functionary and Spain fighter
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1999
Place of death Hamburg