Walter hero

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Walter Held (actually Heinz Epe ; born December 26, 1910 in Remscheid ; † October 28, 1942 in the Soviet Union) was one of the leaders of the German Trotskyists , a collaborator of Leon Trotsky and later a victim of the Stalin terror in the 1930s.

Life

Epe studied law and political sciences in Cologne - where he worked on the magazine of the " Gruppe progressiver Künstler " ( Cologne progressives led by Franz W. Seiwert and others) - and in Vienna . He later became an employee of Prof. Felix Halle , the head of the legal central office at the Central Committee of the KPD in Berlin . At times a leading functionary of the KPD student association Kostufra , he was expelled from the KPD as a "Trotskyist" in 1932 and joined the Left Opposition of the KPD , worked on its weekly newspaper Permanent Revolution and went into exile immediately after the Reichstag fire (February 28, 1933) .

Epe stayed first in Prague , then in France , the Netherlands , Norway and Sweden . In the thirties he was a close collaborator of Leon Trotsky and a leading head of the exile organization of the International Communists of Germany (IKD) and the international youth secretariat of the Trotskyist movement; Trotsky played an important role in the effort to exile Trotsky in Norway. In Norway he worked for a time with Willy Brandt (who mentions this in his memoirs Links und Frei ), for example in the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations in the London office in 1934/35 .

Epe was one of the most gifted leaders of the German Trotskyists, with a broad intellectual horizon. He wrote in the IKD newspaper Our Word on topics such as the World War and the Spanish Civil War , the economic policy of the National Socialists, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin , Stalinism and Marxist theory , the German exile press and the journal for social research . In October 1938 he made the persecution of German anti-fascist emigrants in the Soviet Union during the Great Terror (among others Carola Neher ) the subject of an article in Our Word . The attitude of the “official German emigration towards the fate of their members who emigrated to the Soviet Union” - “The German 'People's Front', Messrs Heinrich and Thomas Mann , Bertolt Brecht , Lion Feuchtwanger , Arnold Zweig , the Weltbühne , the Paris daily newspaper , the Volkszeitung and the Neue Front , Max Braun , Pieck , Dengel , Merker and Jacob Walcher , all of them, all of them are in silence ”- he called the“ saddest and most shameful chapter ”of the bloody tragedy of the Stalinist purges (“ Stalin's German victims and the popular front “, Our Word , Vol. 6, No. 4/5.). In Oslo he published October magazine from 1937 to 1939 . Organ for den fjerde internasjonale , for which not only members of the Trotskyist movement, but also politically differently oriented personalities of the Norwegian and international labor movement such as Jeanette Olsen , Konrad Knudsen and Håkon Meier or Josef Hindels and Victor Serge wrote articles.

The German occupation of Norway in 1940 forced Epe to flee to Sweden . In 1941 he tried to reach the USA via Moscow - Odessa - Istanbul . Together with his wife Synnøve and his son Ivar, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police on the train. His statement that he was an employee of the New York Times - Harrison E. Salisbury reports that the Times helped him obtain a visa for the United States - did not protect him.

While in custody he temporarily shared a cell with the Jewish socialist and leader of the Bund in prewar Poland, Henryk Erlich , who after his release informed the Norwegian embassy about Epes' arrest. Erlich was then arrested again and executed together with Viktor Alter in December 1941. Another inmate reported that Epe, as a former employee of Trotsky, was such an important prisoner for the NKVD that his interrogation was personally directed by NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria . According to recent Soviet information, he was shot on October 28, 1942 for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity". The exact circumstances of his arrest as well as the fate of his wife and son are, despite decades of efforts, mainly by the Norwegian authorities, but also by Willy Brandt, who found out the exact date of his death and the recent judicial rehabilitation of Held during a stay in Moscow in 1989, still in the dark.

literature

  • Einhart Lorenz: Heinz Epe - collaborator with Willy Brandt and Leon Trotsky . In: Resistance and persecution in Remscheid 1933-1945 , Volume 2, Wuppertal 1986, pp. 16-26.
  • Einhart Lorenz: Possibilities and limits of political exile in Norway using the example of Willy Brandt, Heinz Epe, Max Strobl and Jacob Nicolaus Vogel . In: Exile Research. An international year book , Volume 8, Munich 1990, pp. 174-184.
  • Willy Brandt: Left and free. Mein Weg 1930–1950 , Hamburg 1982.
  • Frank Meyer: Intercultural Communication in Exile. For the analysis of journalism in exile in Scandinavia . In: Helga Grebing / Christa Wickert: The other Germany in the resistance against National Socialism. Contributions to the political overcoming of the National Socialist dictatorship in exile and in the Third Reich . Essen 1994, pp. 86-117, v. a. Pp. 98-104 & 113.
  • Epe, Heinz . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hero, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Epe, Heinz (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Trotskyist and victim of the Stalin terror
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Remscheid
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 1942
Place of death Soviet Union