Walter Dittbender

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Walter Dittbender (born November 29, 1891 in Stettin ; † May 2, 1939 in the Soviet Union ) was a German KPD functionary and resistance fighter against National Socialism . In 1929 he was Reichsleiter of the Red Aid of Germany (RHD), in 1933 a witness in the Reichstag fire trial and in 1939 was a victim of Stalinist purges and murdered as an alleged Trotskyist in Soviet exile .

Life

Dittbender, son of a master painter , completed an apprenticeship as a glazier after high school . In 1909 he became a union member and in 1912 a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1914 Dittbender was drafted and fought in the First World War until he was seriously wounded in January 1916 . After a long hospital stay, he became an employee of the German arms and ammunition factories in Berlin , joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and became a member of the Revolutionary Obleute . During the unrest in January 1919, Dittbender was briefly in command of the German weapons and ammunition factories, but then had to flee to the Rhineland . After returning to Berlin in May, he was imprisoned for two months.

From August 1919 Dittbender was a member of the assessment committee of the food association ("Reichsgetreidestelle"). In 1920 he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). From July 1925 he was an employee of the legal central office of the KPD parliamentary group in the Prussian state parliament and was elected to the Berlin city council. At the end of 1926 he was covertly employed by the KPD's illegal intelligence service , the anti-military apparatus (AM apparatus), which existed until 1937 , and was employed in the "decomposition" department.

In June 1927 Dittbender became secretary of the Central Committee of Red Aid Germany (RHD), in 1929 he was Reichsleiter and German representative at International Red Aid (IRH) for a short time .

After the takeover of the Nazis and the ban on communist work, supported Dittbender the party in the illegality. He was arrested on August 10, 1933, taken to the Columbiahaus concentration camp , and severely tortured. He was then a prisoner in the Sonnenburg and Esterwegen concentration camps . At the end of 1933 he was a witness in the Reichstag fire trial. He was released in mid-1934.

Dittbender went through Prague and Warsaw in the emigration to the Soviet Union and was in Moscow Speaker of the Department of Political emigrants of the Central Committee of the International Red Aid (IRH), from 1935 he was head of this department. In July 1935, Dittbender received Soviet citizenship . In 1936/37 he was the head of a so-called “transfer commission” involved in inspections of members of the KPD who had emigrated to the Soviet Union. The actual purpose of this activity was to purge the German emigrants.

In 1938 Dittbender himself came under suspicion and was arrested in March. After lengthy torture, Dittbender made a forced confession and incriminated other party members in confrontations. Dittbender was sentenced to death in May 1939 as a "member of an anti-Soviet Trotskyist terrorist organization" and shot.

Dittbender's son, Kurt Dittbender, born in 1920, returned to Germany in 1945. However, he was arrested there and died on August 5, 1947 in the Soviet Buchenwald special camp .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jochen Staadt: How GDR historians turned the history of the SED and why West German historians looked on benevolently. In: Berliner Zeitung , January 24, 1998.
  2. ↑ Wladislaw Hedeler, Inge Münz-Koenen (ed.): I came to your country as a guest ...: German opponents of Hitler as victims of the Stalin terror. Family fates 1933–1956 , Lukas Verlag, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Dittbender, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German KPD functionary, resistance fighter against National Socialism, victim of Stalinism
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 1939
Place of death Soviet Union