Wilhelm Kasper

Wilhelm Kasper (born August 8, 1892 in Neustadt in the Black Forest ; † January 10, 1985 in Hamburg ) was a German communist politician.

Life

The son of a farm laborer worked in Berlin after completing a commercial apprenticeship . He joined the SPD in 1916 and switched to the USPD a year later . When the left wing of the party merged with the KPD , he belonged to the VKPD and later to the KPD. From 1919 onwards he was a trade union secretary in the free trade union central association of white-collar workers .

From 1923 he was a member of the KPD's district leadership for Berlin and Brandenburg and was responsible for trade union issues. A year later he was also a member of the union department of the party's headquarters at the national level. From 1924 he was also a member of the Prussian state parliament . From 1928 he was managing director of the KPD parliamentary group. From 1932 he was deputy chairman of the civil servants' committee of the state parliament.

From 1929 he was a member of the central committee of the party and was a candidate for the Politburo . He was involved in the so-called Abegg affair . It was a conversation between the Prussian State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior Wilhelm Abegg and the high-ranking official Rudolf Diels on the one hand and the politicians of the KPD Kasper and Ernst Torgler on the other. It was evidently a matter of integrating the KPD into the defense against the strengthening of National Socialism .

After the Nazi seizure of power , he was arrested immediately after the Reichstag fire on February 28, 1933 and imprisoned in the Sonnenburg concentration camp . He was badly mistreated there. At the Reichstag fire trial, he appeared as a witness for Ernst Torgler.

In 1935 he was sentenced to three years in prison by the People's Court . He served his term in prison in Luckau until 1937 . After a period of unemployment, from 1938 onwards he worked for the central administration of Berlin's city goods . In the same year he married for the second time. Until 1939 he was under police supervision.

Immediately after the end of the war he rejoined the KPD. In 1947 the state executive of the SED investigated against him because of his behavior during the time of National Socialism. He was charged with serving the Goebbel propaganda and Kasper was expelled from the party in 1947.

His objection to this was unsuccessful and in order to avoid any possible behavior he fled to Hamburg in September 1947. There he worked first as a gardener and finally as an office worker for the Hamburg city administration. From 1954 he was a member of the State Peace Committee Hamburg. In 1969 he joined the DKP .

literature

• Kasper, Wilhelm . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Entry in the files of the Reich Chancellery