Waldemar Bolze

Waldemar Bolze (born January 11, 1886 in Buk , Posen; † December 14, 1951 in Salzgitter ) was a German journalist and socialist politician.

Life

In SPD, USPD

The trained carpenter Bolze joined the woodworkers' association in 1904 and the SPD in 1906 . While traveling he came to Berlin, where he became a union and party functionary. He left the SPD in 1914 to protest against the truce policy . He was called up as a soldier. In 1917 he joined the USPD .

In KPD, KPD (O)

In 1919 he became a member of the KPD and in 1920 editor of the Red Flag . Waldemar Bolze worked in the trade union department of the KPD headquarters from 1921, where he worked closely with Jacob Walcher . In 1924 he was dismissed, he is one of the so-called Brandlerists who oppose any union split. After the failure of the first ultra-left wave in the KPD, he was recalled to the trade union department in 1926. With the onset of Stalinization of the KPD, his activities in the headquarters came to a quick end. Because of his rejection of the social fascism thesis and especially the RGO course, he was expelled from the KPD in early 1929. W.Bolze joined the KPD (O) and became a member of the KPD (O) Reichsleitung. He continued his journalistic work as an editor for "Arbeiterpolitik".

Emigration, persecution

After the National Socialists "seized power " in 1933, he had to flee immediately. He emigrated first to France and in November 1936 to Spain, where he worked in a Republican aircraft factory during the Spanish Civil War . He kept close political ties to the POUM . In 1937 he was accused by the GPU of being a fascist. Bolze was arrested and held for a year without trial or judgment. When in early 1939, at the end of the Spanish civil war, the Stalinist prison guards fled from Franco's troops, he was able to return to France on foot via the Pyrenees . In 1939 he fled to Belgium and in 1940 back to France. There he was interned again, but was able to escape again. He survived the war in illegality.

return

At the beginning of 1949 he returned to Germany, where he found work as a model carpenter in the foundry of the Reichswerke Salzgitter . W. Bolze became politically active again. He was involved in the workers' policy group and in its central leadership, took part in their Reich conferences and was on numerous lecture tours. He died of tuberculosis on December 14, 1951 in Salzgitter .

Works

• The way of the unions . Bremen 1971 (as PDF file (14.3 MB) here ; PDF; 14.3 MB)

literature

• Theodor Bergmann : "Against the Current". The history of the KPD (opposition) . 2nd edition, Hamburg 2001
• Karl Hermann Tjaden : Structure and function of the "KPD opposition" (KPO) . Meisenheim am Glan 1964
• Hermann Weber : The Change of German Communism - The Stalinization of the KPD in the Weimar Republic . Frankfurt am Main 1969
• Hermann Weber and Dietrich Starnitz (eds.): Communists persecute communists. Stalinist terror and "purges" in the communist parties of Europe since the 1930s . Berlin 1993
• Bolze, Waldemar . In: Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Where are the Real Saboteurs? Text by Waldemar Bolze from 1939 on the events in Catalonia in 1937 (English)