Walter Vosseler

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Walter Vosseler (1931)

Walter Vosseler (also Vosseler ) (born May 9, 1908 in Schwenningen am Neckar ; † March 16, 1981 in Berlin ) was a German Communist, deputy in the Moscow City Soviet, Spain fighter in the International Brigades and - after being imprisoned in the concentration camp, among other things Flossenbürg had survived - diplomat of the GDR .

Childhood and youth

As the child of a working-class family (father precision mechanic, three siblings), Walter Vosseler grew up in Schwenningen am Neckar, which was strongly communist at the time, and attended elementary school (8 classes) from 1914 to 1922. At the age of 14 he began an apprenticeship as a toolmaker and in the same year became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ). After completing his training, he found jobs in Schwenninger watch factories. In 1923, after a five-month ban on the KPD, he converted to the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD). As a result of a strike by the Schwenningen watch workers, he became unemployed for a year from January 1926. In 1928 the now 19-year-old became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), where he received political training (from September to October 1928, attended the 4th association school of the KJVD in Dresden) and went into self-study. From February 1930 there was renewed unemployment as a result of the global economic crisis .

Further memberships were:

Moscow years

In the summer of 1930 there was an encounter with a Soviet engineer who was looking for qualified specialists to build up a Soviet watch and precision engineering industry. A one-year employment contract was signed and Walter Vosseler traveled as a specialist (with a total of 38 workers) to Moscow , where he worked as a toolmaker in the 2nd state watch factory in Moscow from August 1930 to September 1932 and then (from October 1932) an instructor and training instructor in the factory school of the First Moscow Watch Factory .

He married the Russian Ninel Lvovna and was a deputy in the Moscow City Soviet for a four-year term (together with nine other foreign workers from all over Moscow). At the same time, a personal application for transferring membership of the KPD to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was delayed in 1933 because of ongoing party purges ( Stalinist purges ), which prohibited new admissions or transfers for a short time and which also affected Walter Vosseler at the Erste Uhrfabrik personally. As a result, he was party affiliated to the German section of the Communist International . From 1933 to 1936 he also took up studies at the evening university of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West .

International Brigades

In 1937 he volunteered to take part in the Spanish Civil War and received several months of practical training in Ryazan (June to November 1937). At the end of November 1937 an adventurous trip to Spain followed with subsequent admission to the 2nd Battalion "Edgar André" of the XI. International Brigade and subsequently to the 3rd Battalion "Hans Beimler" . He took part in combat operations in the Aragon offensive and the Battle of the Ebro .

Internment and imprisonment in a concentration camp

With the fall of Barcelona on January 26, 1939 and Girona on February 5, 1939, he fled, like more than half a million refugees, to the French border, the only way to escape from the advancing troops of Franco . From February 1939, Walter Vosseler was interned in the following camps: Saint-Cyprien , Argelès-sur-Mer , Camp de Gurs and Mont-Louis . The intention of the French government was to recruit "volunteers" to work in labor companies. So the pressure grew to use the internees in the construction of the Trans-Saharan Railway in North Africa. Extradition to the Gestapo was threatened.

The meanwhile established Vichy regime , recognized by the German Reich, delivered the prisoners to Hitler Germany in April 1941, to the home districts of the prisoners. Walter Vosseler was handed over to the Stuttgart Gestapo and interned again in the Welzheim protective custody camp (May 2 to July 2, 1941).

Subsequently, he was transferred to the Flossenbürg concentration camp (imprisonment July 14, 1941 to April 23, 1945), where he did forced labor in the planning command and then in the camp locksmith's shop. There he came into contact with a resistance group made up of communists and social democrats. Specific plans for an uprising against the SS occupation as the Red Army approached were resolved and prepared, and individual weapons and explosives were procured in order to provide resistance through military action if necessary, even in the event that the SS had exterminated the prisoners beforehand would be planned.

On April 20, 1945, the camp commandant Max Koegel had the prisoners finally evacuated and ordered a death march to the Dachau concentration camp .

The death march was stopped on April 23, 1945 by the American army at Roding and the prisoners were finally freed. Walter Vosseler was entrusted by the 11th Panzer Division of the 3rd US Army with the task of establishing contact with the Red Army in this region. On May 16, 1945, shortly after the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, he took part in the so-called “ Mauthausen oath ”.

Post-war period and GDR

On May 20, he arrived in Vienna and via Prague to Berlin, where he arrived on July 15, 1945. In the immediate post-war period in 1945 he was deputy head of the KPD's cadre department.

Walter Vosseler continued his political work in the GDR, which was founded in October 1949. In 1952 he became deputy department head of the SED Central Committee and on April 1 rose to department head.

In the GDR show trial against Karli Bandelow and Ewald Misera, after the Arrow campaign by the State Secretariat for State Security in 1954, he was responsible for press work.

In 1957 he was entrusted with diplomatic tasks for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the GDR . He was Legation Councilor in Belgrade (1958 to 1962). This was followed by the position of a department head (6th European Department - West Germany) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1962 to 1963) and that of an embassy council in Warsaw (1963 to 1967). In Warsaw he succeeded Ewald Moldt . From 1967 to 1972 he occupied the position of deputy head of department and then a head of department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold in 1968 and the honor bar for this medal in 1978.

Walter Vosseler was buried as a person persecuted by National Socialism in the Berlin-Baumschulenweg cemetery (Treptow-Köpenick district).

literature

  • Hans-Peter Klausch : Resistance in Flossenbürg. On the anti-fascist resistance struggle of the German, Austrian and Soviet communists in the Flossenbürg concentration camp from 1940–1945. 1990, pp. 41, 43, 53. ( full text uni-oldenburg.de)
  • Bruno Baum : The last days of Mauthausen. Berlin 1965, p. 106 ff.
  • Catherine Epstein : The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century. 2003, note section.
  • Committee of the Antifascist Resistance Fighters of the German Democratic Republic: Memorandum Ru: A report on solidarity and resistance in the Mauthausen concentration camp from 1938 to 1945. 1979, p. 171.
  • Jakob Boulanger : A number above the heart: experience report from twelve years in prison. 1957, p. 135.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Peter Klausch: Resistance in Flossenbürg. On the anti-fascist resistance struggle of the German, Austrian and Soviet communists in the Flossenbürg concentration camp from 1940–1945. 1999. Full text University of Oldenburg
  2. ↑ Bruno Baum: The last days of Mauthausen. Berlin 1965, p. 106 ff.
  3. ↑ Michael Kubina: The structure of the central party apparatus of the KPD 1945-1946. In: Anatomy of the party headquarters. The KPD / SED on the way to power. Berlin 1998, p. 110.
  4. ^ Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Roger Engelmann: Concentrated Strikes: State Security Actions and Political Processes in the GDR 1953-1956. Berlin 1998, p. 134.
  5. ^ In: Protocols of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the SED, DY 30 Secretariat, 1961–1970. Sessions 1962 January, Berlin.
  6. ↑ Protocols of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the SED, DY 30 Secretariat, 1961–1970. Sessions 1963 October, Berlin.
  7. ↑ Neues Deutschland , April 29, 1978, p. 6.
  8. ↑ Memorial complex in the Baumschulenweg cemetery , accessed on November 10, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Vosseler, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vosseler, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist and Spanish fighter of the International Brigades
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwenningen am Neckar
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 1981
Place of death Berlin