Wassil Tanew

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Wassil Konstantinow Tanew ( Bulgarian Васил Константинов Танев , German-outdated Wassil Konstantinoff Taneff , also Vasil Taneff; born November 21, 1897 in Gevgelija , Ottoman Empire ; † October 9, 1941 in Evangelistra ) was a Bulgarian communist. He became known as one of the five defendants in the 1933 Reichstag arson trial .

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Tanew learned the shoemaking trade. From 1919 he belonged to the Bulgarian Communist Party . In 1923 he took part in the failed September communist uprising in Sofia . He then fled to Yugoslavia. He spent the years 1926 to 1929 in the Soviet Union , where he worked for the Comintern . He later returned to Bulgaria, where he worked for the party before coming to Germany in the early 1930s.

A few days after the fire in the Reichstag in February 1933, Tanew was arrested in Berlin on March 9, 1933 - allegedly because the police had evidence that he was directly involved in the setting fire to the building as either an accomplice or a covert organizational part.

Following the preliminary investigation by the Gestapo Tanev was the so-called Reichstag fire trial along with the encountered in the Reichstag Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe and his two Bulgarian compatriots Georgi Dimitrov and Blagoy Popov said and German Communist Party politician Ernst Torgler before the Supreme Court in Leipzig accused the To have carried out or prepared the attack on the Reichstag building.

The defense of Tanew and the other two Bulgarians took over the lawyer Paul Teichert . During the negotiations, which lasted from September 21 to December 23, 1933, Tanew did not excel - probably also because of his poor language skills. The public's attention was mainly directed towards van der Lubbe and the prominent politician Torgler and Dimitrov, who appeared as the main spokesman for the defendants.

At the end of the trial, Tanew was acquitted on December 23, along with Dimitroff, Popoff and Torgler, while van der Lubbe was sentenced to death and executed. Despite the acquittal, the other three acquitted were not released but initially held in protective custody . Various reasons are given in the literature about the motives for this measure: partly because the Nazi leadership was disappointed with the judgment of the court and wanted to punish the accused with protective custody as an alternative, and also because the government wanted to protect them from savage attacks by the SA that would have cast a negative light on the Nazi state in the world press.

In the spring of 1934, Tanew, Popow and Dimitrov were given Soviet citizenship by Josef Stalin . They were then flown to Koenigsberg and from there to Moscow . In the Soviet Union, Tanew, like the other two, was initially considered a hero, but was later arrested in the course of the Stalinist purges and held in a penal camp on the Arctic Circle for a few years .

During the Second World War Tanew made himself available to the Bulgarian partisan movement . In September 1941, he and other emigrants parachuted over Bulgaria. There he was finally arrested and shot.

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personal data
SURNAME Tanew, Wassil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tanew, Wassil Konstantinow (full name); Танев, Васил Константинов (Bulgarian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bulgarian communist
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1897 or 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Gevgelija , Ottoman Empire
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1941
Place of death Evangelistra