Wilhelm Knapp
Wilhelm Knapp (born January 6, 1898 in Bremen , † April 4, 1984 in Rostock ) was a German party functionary ( KPD , SED ) and resistance fighter against National Socialism .
Life
Wilhelm Knapp was born into a working-class family. He completed a commercial apprenticeship. From 1916 to 1918 he was a soldier in the First World War . In 1919 he became a member of the KPD . From 1921 to 1923 he worked as an employee of the pension office in Oldenburg . From 1923 he worked full-time in the KPD apparatus. In 1923/24 Knapp was the head of the Northwest District Management and was a member of the so-called Directory in Bremen while preparing for the Hamburg uprising in autumn 1923. From 1924 he was head of the Thüringisches Volksblatt publishing house in Gotha , from 1926 of the Südwestdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung in Frankfurt am Main and from 1929 to 1932 of the Süddeutsche Arbeiterzeitung in Stuttgart . In 1932 he was sent to Vienna by the Central Committee of the KPD , where he headed the Red Flag publishing house for the KPÖ until 1934 . and in 1934/35 he was the publishing director of the Arbeiterzeitung in Saarbrücken and at the same time acted as Reich courier on behalf of the Central Committee . On August 7, 1935, he was in a meeting with Wienand Kaasch arrested in Berlin and twelve years from 1936 penitentiary convicted, he in Luckau and Brandenburg was serving. In the Brandenburg prison he was a member of the illegal party leadership of the KPD.
His family was able to emigrate to Czechoslovakia and later to Great Britain in 1935 . His son Werner Knapp (* 1921) became a soldier in the Czechoslovak Army in France in 1939 and was a member of the British Pioneer Corps in 1940/41.
In 1945 Wilhelm Knapp first became the personnel director of the BVG in Greater Berlin, and from 1948 the main director of the East Berlin transport company. From 1952 he succeeded Ernst Ramlow as director of the China Export Corporation in Berlin and from 1955 director of the German shipping company . He then worked in the GDR's foreign trade. In 1961 he was posted to Rome, where he headed the GDR commercial agency in Italy until February 1965.
From the beginning of the 1970s he lived as a veteran in Rostock.
Awards
- Medal for fighters against fascism 1933 to 1945
- 1955 Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze and 1972 in gold
- 1978 Gold medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit
- 1983 Karl Marx Order
literature
- Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
- Max Frenzel, Wilhelm Thiele, Artur Mannbar: Broken fetters: A report on the anti-fascist resistance and the history of the illegal party organization of the KPD in the Brandenburg-Görden prison from 1933-1945
Web links
- Ceremonial lecture on the establishment of the German shipping company Rostock
- Memorial sites for victims and persecutees of the Nazi regime in the New Cemetery in Rostock p. 33f.
- Reinhard Schulz: Change of conductors. Berlin tram traffic between East and West 1949 to 1953 ( Memento from February 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) in traffic history sheets, 1/2013
Individual evidence
- ↑ Werner Knapp in the DRAFD Wiki
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung , September 17, 1952, p. 5.
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung , May 7, 1955, p. 5.
- ↑ Neues Deutschland , February 8, 1965, p. 2.
- ↑ Neues Deutschland , December 21, 1972, p. 5.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Knapp, Wilhelm |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German party functionary and anti-fascist resistance fighter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 6, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bremen |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 4th 1984 |
| Place of death | Rostock |