Willi Kropp

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Willi Kropp (born November 3, 1899 in Grünberg ; † August 8, 1961 in Weimar ) was a German communist politician ( KPD / SED ), university professor and journalist in the GDR .

Life

Willi Kropp was born in Grünberg near Gießen in 1899, the son of a businessman and a farmer . As a teenager, Kropp was active in the Wandervogel movement. In 1914 and 1915 he was a trainee in a Hamburg bookshop and learned the trade of bookseller . In 1915 and 1916 Kropp began an agricultural apprenticeship on a Hessian estate. In 1917 he became a volunteer at the Eden horticultural cooperative near Oranienburg . In 1918 Kropp fought in World War I and became a non-commissioned officer . In 1919 and 1920 he lived in a rural commune near the Edertalsperre . In 1920 Kropp went to the Ruhr area and worked as an auxiliary tugboat in a colliery near Bochum until 1922 .

Kropp became a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) and the KPD in 1920 . From 1921 to 1923 he was training chairman of the KPD in the Ruhr area and member of the Hessen- Frankfurt district management and headed a local KJVD group in Darmstadt . In June 1923 Kropp was arrested by the French secret police and a month later by a military court convicted of "anti-militarist action against the French troops" to one year in prison, which he in prison Diez / Lahn was serving.

After his release from prison in September 1924 he became head of a KPD bookstore and the KPD's literature sales department, first in Frankfurt am Main , then in Stuttgart . In 1924 and 1925 Kropp was a member of the KPD district leadership in Württemberg . In 1925 he returned to the Ruhr area and became managing director of the Niederrheinische Arbeiterzeitung in Duisburg and first editor of the Ruhrecho newspaper . In late 1929 Kropp was arrested again and in April 1930 because of " high treason " to two years imprisonment convicted. Kropp was able to escape and lived for a few months in the Soviet Union , where he was editor of the German Central Newspaper in Moscow . In May 1931 Kropp returned to Germany, surrendered to the authorities and served the sentence until January 1933 in Darmstadt Fortress .

After his release, Kropp headed the agitprop department of the KPD Berlin-Brandenburg and was a member of the central committee of the KPD. On May 4, 1933, Kropp was arrested again, badly mistreated and interned in the Sonnenburg concentration camp. In September 1934, Kropp was dismissed and became a member of the illegal KPD leadership. In December 1934 Kropp emigrated to France and in 1935 to the Soviet Union. There he worked until 1940 as the personal secretary of Wilhelm Florin , was head of the Thälmann committee of the KPD leadership and a consultant for Scandinavia in the Communist International . In early 1941, Kropp worked for the publishing house foreign language literature and studied at the college of the Communist International in Kuschnarenkowo and other party schools.

At the end of 1941, Kropp was evacuated to the city of Ufa , where he became a propagandist among German prisoners of war. In 1943 he was appointed chief commissioner in a camp in the central Urals and a teacher at the prisoner-of-war school in Krasnogorsk . In 1944 Kropp became a lecturer at the party school of the KPD in Moscow under the code name Willi Keller .

On May 28, 1945, Kropp returned to Germany. He was flown to Mecklenburg to reinforce the Sobottka group . In June 1945, Kropp became head of the culture and training department of the KPD state leadership in Mecklenburg in Schwerin . After differences with Gustav Sobottka , Kropp was transferred to Berlin in September . Until March 1947, Willi Kropp was, together with Carl Bose of the SPD , the first director of the SED party college "Karl Marx" in Liebenwalde . In autumn 1947 Kropp was recalled and became director of the German Administrative Academy in Forst Zinna .

On August 9, 1951, Kropp received a reprimand for "behavior that was harmful to the party" and was relieved of his post. Kropp had ignored the decision of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED on the prohibition of entering West Berlin . From 1951 Kropp worked as editor of the GDR news agency General German News Service (ADN) and later as head of department at the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland . In September 1955, Kropp was appointed professor at the FDGB University of Bernau and received the chair for historical materialism . Kropp died in Weimar in 1961 .

Honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The party college of the SED - a critical review. Historical insights
  2. ^ Mike Schmeitzner : Schools of the dictatorship. The cadre training of the KPD / SED in Saxony 1945–1952 (PDF; 1.2 MB) Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research at the Technical University of Dresden
personal data
SURNAME Kropp, Willi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kropp, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD, SED)
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Grünberg
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1961
Place of death Weimar