Willi Kreikemeyer

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Willi Kreikemeyer (born January 11, 1894 in Salbke near Magdeburg, † probably August 31, 1950 ) was a communist Spain fighter , as a functionary of the SED from 1949 to 1950 director general of the Deutsche Reichsbahn in the GDR and was a victim of the field affair .

Life

Kreikemeyer was a trained lathe operator. He joined the trade union in 1910 and the KPD in 1919 . Through his functionary work for the KPD, he came into close contact with Willi Münzenberg .

Kreikemeyer was seriously wounded in the Spanish Civil War and was then appointed first as the cadre chief of the German department and later as chief adjutant for all the cadre departments of the international brigades . During these activities he had contact with Erich Mielke , who at that time was head of the instruction department and adjutant of the central administration under the code name Leistner or Leissner . Among other things, it is known that Kreikemeyer knew about Mielke's efforts to escape to safe Mexico , as well as about the help Mielke received from the Noel Fields aid organization .

Field affair

After the Second World War, Kreikemeyer rose to the position of General Director of the Deutsche Reichsbahn until 1949. In the course of the Field affair, he was targeted by the Central Party Control Commission of the SED because he had worked for Fields relief organization. During the investigation he assigned the code name Leistner Erich Mielke , the State Secretary in the Ministry for State Security (MfS). For Mielke, who had been officially informed, this raised the risk of being recognized as a beneficiary of Fields and being drawn into the affair as a suspect with life-threatening consequences. Mielke had Kreikemeyer arrested by the MfS and taken to the pre-trial detention center on Albrechtstrasse in Berlin-Mitte, where he immediately interrogated him. The Kreikemeyer case was henceforth a taboo subject in the GDR, including within the MfS.

Kreikemeyer's death

After the interrogation by Mielke, who informed him of the exclusion from the party, and the drafting of a personal statement, Kreikemeyer committed suicide by hanging, according to the MfS later : Kreikemeyer had had a bad cold and is therefore said to have asked a guard to hand over the confiscated handkerchiefs, and then hanged themselves on the cell door with three handkerchiefs knotted together. This version was written down four years after the alleged suicide and was not published until 1957. The death certificate was also issued later in 1957. Wolfgang Kießling doubted this representation . He did not find any evidence that the inmate's body was examined by a doctor, nor is there any documentation of where he was buried. There are two letters from Mielke to Walter Ulbricht in which he alleged that Kreikemeyer was handed over to Soviet authorities and that he died in 1955 in Soviet custody.

Kreikemeyer's fate was never clarified. Wolfgang Kießling suspects that Mielke had Kreikemeyer murdered, but does not want to completely rule out suicide, because Kreikemeyer's last notes in custody document his deep dismay at his exclusion from the party.

Corruptive measures against his wife

Kreikemeyer's wife, Marthe Kreikemeyer, was classified as “hostile to the GDR” - probably because she repeatedly wrote letters to the authorities demanding clarification about her husband's fate. These letters identify her as a staunch communist who firmly believed in a miscarriage of justice. Her only "hostile" act was her refusal to surrender her French passport while her parents were still alive.

Mielke drove her out of the country: in 1954 he invited her to a conversation in which he supposedly wanted to comment on Kreikemeyer's fate. In fact, however, he confronted her with suspicions that she was also involved in the Field affair. Marthe Kreikemeyer then fled to West Berlin and on to France. She continued to send her letters to East Berlin through the French Communist Party . There they were deliberately ignored. In April 1956, a “Commission for the Review of Affairs of Party Members” , which met as part of the de-Stalinization under the chairmanship of Walter Ulbricht, decided : “... to take note of Ms. Kreikemeyer's letter and to recommend that the state organs not reply to Ms. Kreikemeyer because she is a foreigner herself and lives abroad. "

Marthe Kreikemeyer did not get an answer until 1957: The above-mentioned Stasi version of her husband's suicide. Until her death in 1986 she continued to write letters to the GDR authorities. The only result was that Willi Kreikemeyer's expulsion from the party was eventually reversed. In 1990 Kreikemeyer was rehabilitated by the PDS .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Document 3: Second meeting of the Central Committee's Commission to Review the Affairs of Party Members on April 25, 1956 . In: Josef Gabert (Ed.): Proposals for dismissal ... Activities and work results of the commission of the Central Committee for the review of affairs of party members 1956. Documents . Dietz, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-320-01610-5 , p. 20
  2. ↑ Lothar Hornbogen: Political Rehabilitation - A Lesson from Our History
personal data
SURNAME Kreikemeyer, Willi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SED functionary, general director of the Reichsbahn, key figure in the field affair
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Salbke near Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1950