Willi Mielenz

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Willy Carl Theodor Mielenz (born May 17, 1895 in Berlin ; † August 1, 1942 in a gulag in the Kemerovo area in Siberia ) was a German communist resistance fighter .

Life

Willy Mielenz was born in Berlin as the son of the Trebatsch postal assistant Friedrich Wilhelm August Mielenz and his wife Marie Johanne Margareta née Sarre. His mother came from a Huguenot family who had lived in Berlin for several generations . After a broken apprenticeship, he worked as a metalworker on tour in northern Germany, Denmark and Sweden. In Brunsvik near Ludvika he took courses at a workers' community college for seven months in 1913/14 .

Shortly before the start of the First World War, he returned to Germany and was a soldier on the front lines from 1915 to 1918 and was wounded several times. Coming home from the war, Mielenz became secretary and member of the executive committee of the Liegnitz Workers 'and Soldiers' Council, after which he was a delegate for the SPD at the 1st Council Congress in Berlin .

In the spring of 1919 he published the book: Liegnitz in the days of the revolution . Then he was forced to flee from the Freikorps troops, he came back to Sweden and came into contact with left-wing socialists. Towards the end of 1919, he and others were expelled from Sweden. In the following year Mielenz returned to Germany under the code name Lorenz.

He soon joined the KPD, worked in the KJI apparatus and was temporarily a deputy member of the KJI's executive committee for Scandinavia. In some cases he carried out illegal activities for the communist youth organizations. From March 1921 he was jointly responsible for courier services, forgery of passports and the procurement of illegal quarters at the KPD headquarters. In March 1922 he went to Moscow at the request of Otto Wille Kuusinen , where he became a consultant in the information department of the Comintern. In the period from September 1923 to August 1924 he returned to Germany in his old positions as head of the illegal area under Leo Flieg's group of employees , and took an active part in the preparations for the German uprising in October .

Mielenz went again to the Soviet Union from September 1924 to autumn 1929, and worked as a consultant in the Comintern's Scandinavian country secretariat. In autumn 1929 he turned back to Germany and became technical secretary of the secretariat in the Central Committee of the KPD, where he was responsible for parts of the illegal apparatus.

In mid-1930 he represented Heinz Neumann as a double in a discussion evening convened by Joseph Goebbels in the Saalbau Friedrichshain, where the latter wanted to argue with communism. In order to avoid the expected mass brawl, Mielenz was sent to the discussion evening because he looked like Neumann.

Because of his alleged belonging to Neumann's group , he was removed from his position as technical secretary in mid-1932 at the instigation of Ernst Thälmann . The publisher Willi Münzenberg stood up for Mielenz, which enabled him to move to the IAH headquarters in Moscow. Once again he was replaced there on personal intervention by Ernst Thälmann and deployed as an IAH instructor in Iceland.

Mielenz began in 1933 with an extensive speaker activity against the National Socialist regime in Norway. In March 1934, his German citizenship was withdrawn.

Since March 1933 he was seriously ill and therefore took longer hospital stays in Oslo, Paris and Moscow. After his recovery he was released from the IAH in 1935, but initially remained with the Comintern as a translator, but was also released from the Comintern apparatus in June 1937. He decided to emigrate to France, but his recurring illness made it impossible for him.

Mielenz was arrested in the course of the Stalinist purges on October 13, 1938 for espionage for a foreign service in Moscow. The military college of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him on May 14, 1939 under Articles 17, 58–8, 58–10, paragraph 1 and 58–11 for legal Trotskyism and connections to Neumann , Remmele , Pyatnitzki , Kun and Knorin to ten years in a camp . On August 1, 1942, Mielenz died in a gulag in the Kemerovo region of Siberia.

It was only on September 28, 1988 that he was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR .

Own writings

  • Liegnitz in the days of the revolution: a historical Summary d. Activity d. Liegnitz workers and soldiers council . Seyffarth, Liegnitz 1919.

literature

  • Hermann Weber, Jakov Drabkin, Bernhard H. Bayerlein, Aleksandr Galkin: Germany, Russia, Comintern - Overviews, Analyzes, Discussions: New Perspectives on the History of the KPD and German-Russian Relations (1918–1943) . de Gruyter, 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-030098-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see birth certificate of the Berlin registry office VIIb No. 1274/1895, viewed online at Ancestry.de on August 25, 2018.
  2. ↑ see marriage certificate of the registry office Berlin VIIa No. 95/1895, viewed online at Ancestry.de on August 25, 2018.
  3. ^ Siegfried Grundmann: Richard Großkopf and the Communist Passport Forger Organization (p. 428). In: International Scientific Correspondence on the History of the German Labor Movement 40 (2004), Otto Suhr Institute, Berlin.
  4. ^ Ralf Georg Reuth: Goebbels: A biography . Piper Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-492-22023-1 .
  5. ^ Hannes H. Gissurarson: Twists And Turns In The History Of The Icelandic Communist Movement. In: The Reykjavik Grapevine. February 15, 2012, accessed on August 25, 2018 (English): "A Comintern agent, Willi Mielenz, was sent to Iceland in 1932, probably to advise on illegal activity ..."
personal data
SURNAME Mielenz, Willi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mielenz, Willy Carl Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1942
Place of death Region of Kemerovo , Siberia