West German Refugee Congress

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The West German Refugee Congress was a political cover organization of the SED , which existed in the then Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s .

history

The Federation of Expellees and the East German Landsmannschaften were among the political enemy organizations in the Federal Republic for the SED and the State Security . It was necessary to fight these interest groups with all means, as they did not recognize the existence of the GDR as a state, the rule of the SED and the borders with Poland and the Soviet Union. The West German Refugee Congress was part of the GDR's political campaign against top politicians and functionaries of the Association of Expellees and individual compatriots . "Since the SED regime denied the expulsion of a quarter of its citizens, the West German expellees had little sympathy for the socialist model, which is why the KPD in the Federal Republic did not succeed in getting a significant number of expellee votes," wrote Andreas Kossert . Therefore, the SED and the West German KPD shifted to infiltrating the apparatus of associations of the West German expellees and to woo the expellees through cover organizations. For this purpose, a preparatory committee for the congress of West German representatives of refugees and expellees was formed on June 30, 1951 in Düsseldorf during the meeting of a "West German refugee counseling" .

The West German Refugee Congress was founded in Karlsruhe in 1951 under conspiratorial conditions. The approximately 500 “delegates” were selected by the KPD and recruited with free travel, accommodation, food and a daily allowance of 9 DM. The umbrella organizations of the expellees, the Central Association of Expelled Germans (ZvD) and the United East German Landsmannschaften (VOL) as well as the Federal Ministry for Expellees warned that the WFK was a camouflaged communist association and thus kept the vast majority of the expellees away from the WFK . The WFK did not announce membership figures; the WFK's West German Refugee Voice had a circulation of 15,000 in 1953 and 27,000 in 1955. The impact and influence of the WFK remained extremely marginal. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the WFK as a communist-directed and accordingly infiltrated organization; After the KPD ban in 1956, the WFK was banned in Germany in 1958.

Well-known WFK employees were Georg Herde , who was considered the political-ideological head of the organization, and Alexa Stolze; After the WFK was banned, he founded the journal Neue Kommentare , based in Frankfurt am Main, in which, from a communist perspective, he agitated against the associations of expellees. In 1987 Herde and Stolze published a monograph on the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft in the SED-financed Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Heike Amos: Associations of expellees in the crosshairs: Activities of the GDR State Security: dE Gruyter, Oldenbourg 2011 ISBN 9783486705898 .
  2. ^ Andreas Kossert: Cold home. The story of the German expellees after 1945 . Munich: Siedler 2008. ISBN 3886808610 , p. 187 ff.