Wilhelm Grothaus

Wilhelm Grothaus (born November 17, 1893 in Herten ; † 1966 there ) was a German KPD / SED politician and a victim of National Socialism and Stalinism .

Origin and education

Wilhelm Grothaus was born in Herten as the son of a miner and a farm worker and grew up there. From 1900 to 1907 he attended elementary school . After throwing stones at soldiers who were deployed against striking workers, his father had to answer in 1905 for breach of the peace . Between 1907 and 1911 Grothaus worked as a farm worker and then began an apprenticeship as a stone setter . From 1912 he was employed as a clerk , interrupted by short-term work as a union employee. In 1914 he was called up for military service. From 1916 to 1920 he was employed at the Herten economic office.

Party membership and professional life

In 1918 or 1919 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). After his school days he had attended evening school courses alongside his professional activities . From 1920 to 1922 he was employed as a payroll clerk in a coal mine before he became managing director of a wine and liquor store in Recklinghausen for the next four years. In 1926 he moved to Berlin as managing director of a social democratic housing association . After another change of employer, he worked for the “non-profit housing welfare of the Reichsbund Deutscher Tenant eV” until 1934. In Berlin he met Georg Schumann , who influenced his further life. Probably at his instigation, Grothaus joined the KPD in 1932 after many years of membership in the SPD. He had to give up his job with the Reichsbund deutscher tenants in 1934 because he was expelled from Berlin after the seizure of power . He moved with his wife to Dresden , where he became managing director of a publishing company. From 1937 to 1939 he was unemployed. In the period around 1939/40 he was managing director of a Radebeul school book publisher and at the beginning of 1940 employed by the Dresden tax office. From March 1940 he was an accountant in the steel construction company Kelle & Hildebrandt in Dresden.

resistance

In Dresden he was still active in the resistance against National Socialism. There he met Georg Schumann again, who worked in Leipzig after his release from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and had founded a resistance group there based on the National Committee for Free Germany . In 1943 Grothaus founded and led a subgroup of the Schumann-Engert-Kresse Group in Dresden. The entire group was probably betrayed to the Gestapo from within their own ranks in the spring of 1944 . Grothaus later accused Kurt Sindermann of being a traitor. In March of the same year Grothaus was also arrested, and a short time later his wife. In November 1944, Schumann and several other group members were sentenced to death by the People's Court for “preparation for high treason , favoring the enemy and degrading military strength ” and later executed. The trial against the Dresden group was to take place on April 18, 1945. During the air raids on Dresden from February 13th, Grothaus managed to escape from the prison and he managed to flee to Westphalia , where he saw the end of the war.

Life in the GDR

In June 1945 he returned to Dresden to look for his wife. At first he worked again at Kelle & Hildebrandt and became chairman of a residential party organization of the KPD. As a recognized victim of fascism and an eloquent KPD member, he quickly made a career in the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ) . About the stations as director of Dresdner tax office , head of state elections in 1946 in the district of Meissen , he rose in the Ministry of Agriculture of the GDR in the Department of Land Reform in between 1947 and 1950 for Ministerialdirigenten on. In 1950 he fell out of favor with the GDR leadership after his superior minister, Reinhard Uhle, fled to the West and thus avoided imminent arrest. Grothaus was accused of “lack of vigilance” and “failure to fulfill the party mandate and endangering state security”. The further allegations of corruption and bribery were completely unfounded. The proceedings ended with immediate dismissal from civil service and a stern reprimand, combined with a two-year ban on any function in the state and party.

17th of June

Grothaus went back to Kelle & Hildebrandt as an accountant, whose owners were expropriated after the referendum in Saxony in 1946 and which was continued as a state- owned company . Because of his selfless commitment to the interests of the workers, he quickly won the respect of the workforce there. During the uprising on June 17, 1953 , he was elected chairman of the commission, which was supposed to present the demands for free elections and the release of political prisoners. As a speaker at VEM Sachsenwerk , he had a speech duel with the senior president of the Volkskammer, Otto Buchwitz . Buchwitz wanted to keep the workers from strikes and demonstrations and was whistled for it, while Grothaus received applause for his proposal to elect a commission in the Sachsenwerk and to enforce the demands together.

The following night, Grothaus was arrested by the Ministry for State Security and imprisoned in a Soviet military prison. Later he was handed over to the Stasi again, which forced him to confess in endless interrogations that he had "seized the initiative" in order to make "reactionary demands" and was thus the "initiator of fascist provocations". On July 23, 1953, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in a show trial against him and other members of the strike leadership at the 1st criminal senate of the Dresden District Court , where the verdicts were certain before the start . In the Sächsische Zeitung he was then defamed as an “unscrupulous traitor to the working class ” who cleverly disguised himself as a SED member in order to then show his true face as a “traitor to the interests of the working class”. After he was almost murdered by the National Socialists , he was accused of having “wanted to reestablish the fascist dictatorship”. As a warning, the newspaper wrote that traitors from within their own ranks would be punished more severely than “old fascists ”. Workers from the Sachsenwerk showing solidarity and wanting to stand up for Grothaus in a Soviet workers 'delegation were told that Hitler had already insisted on the workers' demands in an intrusive and provocative manner.

Wilhelm Grothaus was hit hard by the judgment and the public defamation. He wrote this to the district attorney, to whom he emphasized that he had only fought for the workers' movement all his life and that he had seen the longed-for state in the GDR. He was treated like an ordinary criminal by the SED rulers. In June 1960, a pardon was rejected by him on the grounds that the public danger of his act would rule out an early release from prison. After Wilhelm Pieck's death he was pardoned on November 15, 1960 as part of a general pardon. A few days later he was able to leave Waldheim prison .

Return to Herten

Deeply disappointed in communism and its longed-for state, he went back to his hometown of Herten in West Germany .

Although physically and mentally battered by the detention, he did not spare himself. He supported former fellow prisoners who continued to live in the GDR with parcel deliveries and gave lectures to explain the true nature of Stalinism and later so-called real socialism .

Grothaus died in Herten in 1966 without his hopes of seeing fellow prisoners who had remained in the GDR come true.

Works

• Residential buildings of the non-profit housing welfare organization of the Reichsbund Deutscher Mieter e. V. Rhenania-Verlag Th. P. Braun, Düsseldorf 1930.

literature

• Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk:  Grothaus, Wilhelm . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Heidi Roth; June 17, 1953 in Saxony, special edition for the Saxon State Center for Political Education; Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research eV at the Technical University of Dresden
• Dorothea Heintze: Anyone who watches is a traitor, in: Chrismon 11/2017, p. 37.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l} Heidi Roth: Wilhem Grothaus. In: Karl Wilhelm Fricke (Hrsg.): Opposition and resistance in the GDR. CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-406-47619-8 , pp. 327-331.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk:  Grothaus, Wilhelm . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
3. ^ Kurt Sindermann In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .