Heinrich Gottlob "Heiner" Rau (2 April 1899 – 23 March 1961) was a German communist politician during the Weimar Era, a commander in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and a leading East German statesman after World War II.
Rau grew up in a suburb of Stuttgart, where early on he became active in socialist youth organizations. After military service in World War I, he participated in the German revolution of 1918–1919. From 1920 onward, he was a leading agricultural policy maker of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). This ended in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power. Shortly afterward Rau was thrown in jail for two years. As an enemy of the Nazi regime in Germany he was imprisoned, in total, for more than half of the time of Hitler's rule. After his first imprisonment he emigrated in 1935 to the Soviet Union (USSR). From there, in 1937, he went on to Spain, where he participated in the Spanish Civil War as a leader of one of the International Brigades. In 1939, he was arrested in France, and was delivered by the Vichy regime back to Nazi Germany in 1942. After a few months in a Gestapo prison, he was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp in March 1943. While in the concentration camp he participated in conspiratorial prisoner activities, which led to a camp uprising in the final days before the end of World War II in Europe.
After the war he played an important role in the political scene of East Germany. Before the establishment of an East German state he was the chairman of the German Economic Commission, the precursor to the East German government. Subsequently, he became chairman of the National Planning Commission of East Germany and a deputy chairman of the East German Council of Ministers. He was a leading economic politician and diplomat of East Germany and led various ministries at different times. Within East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) he was a member of the party's Central Committee Politburo.
Origins and early political career
Stuttgart
Early years until World War I
Rau was born in Feuerbach, now a part of Stuttgart, in the German Kingdom of Württemberg, the son of a peasant who later became a factory worker. He grew up in the adjacent city of Zuffenhausen, now also a part of Stuttgart. After finishing school in spring 1913, he started work as a press operator in a shoe factory. In November 1913 he changed his employer and moved to the Bosch factory works in Feuerbach. There he completed his training as metal presser and remained until autumn 1920, with interruptions due to war service during 1917-1918 and the subsequent German Revolution of 1918–1919.
From 1913 Rau also was active in the labour movement. In that year he joined the metal workers' union (Deutscher Metallarbeiterverband) and a social democratic youth group in Zuffenhausen. During the following years, which saw the beginning of World War I, Rau's youth group, whose leader he became in 1916, was significantly influenced by the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The leftists considered the war a conflict between "imperialist powers". A few local members of a far left SPD group, among them Edwin Hoernle and Albert Schreiner, who later became well-known members of the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), visited the youth group in Zuffenhausen and gave lectures. In 1916, Rau joined the Spartacists as well and became a co-founder of their youth organisation. In accordance with the politics of the Spartacists, in 1917 he joined the left-wing Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and in 1919 the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which had been founded mainly by members of the Spartacus League.
In spring 1917, Rau, by this time an elected trade union official in his firm, participated in the attempt to organise a strike against the war. His action led to a reprimand from his employer, and may have hastened his conscription into the army in August 1917. In the army he was trained in the Zuffenhausen-garrisoned Infantry Regiment 126 and deployed to the Western Front as member of a machine gun company.For documents on Infantry Regiment 126' see In September 1918 a shell splinter penetrated his lungs. In the following weeks, he was treated in military hospitals in Weimar and in Stuttgart's neighbouring town Ludwigsburg. While in Ludwigsburg, Rau managed to get leave at short notice on 8 November 1918 and joined the in those days developing revolution in Stuttgart.
Revolution The revolution in November 1918 led in Württemberg, like everywhere in Germany, to the end of the monarchy. King William II left Stuttgart on 9 November, shortly after a revolutionary crowd had stormed his residence, the Wilhelm Palais and flown a red flag above the building. On the very same day the demonstrators were also able to seize some of Stuttgart's barracks, where parts of the garrisons openly joined them. Rau took active part in the events in Stuttgart's streets on this and the following day.
These happenings were a first cumulation of a civil commotion, that had started a few days earlier with large strikes and demonstrations. On 4 November 1918, a first workers' council under the leadership of the 23-year-old Spartacist Fritz Rück had been established in Stuttgart.For Fritz Rück and the workers' councils in Württemberg, see
For Albert Schreiner and the soldiers' councils in Württemberg, see During the following days and weeks more spontaneously elected worker and soldier councils were formed, and took over a large part of Württemberg. Rau was elected leader of the military police in his home city of Zuffenhausen, a part of Stuttgart's urban area.
As early as 9 November, about 150 councillors gathered for a two-day meeting in Stuttgart. A majority of the councillors entrusted the leaders of the SPD and USPD political parties, who had been invited to the meeting, with the establishment of a provisional government in Württemberg. The Spartacist Albert Schreiner, then chairman of a soldier council, initially assumed the key position of Minister of War in this quickly established first government, which for the time being shared power with the councils. However, he resigned already a few days later, after disputes about the future course of the government. While the Spartacists considered as their ideal aim the kinds of results achieved by the previous year's October Revolution in Russia, the position of the other USPD politicians was unclear and the SPD leaders supported a parliamentary democracy and early elections in Württemberg.
During the ensuing months the communists tried repeatedly to seize power in Stuttgart and other cities in Württemberg through armed rebellion, accompanied by large-scale strikes. They seized public buildings and print offices. During one such an attempt - at the beginning of April 1919 when the Bavarian Soviet Republic was formally proclaimed in Munich - a general strike took place in the Stuttgart area. The government in Stuttgart imposed a state of emergency and 16 people died in street fights. At the time of these events, Rau used his position as chief of the military police in Zuffenhausen to shut down companies that remained operational while the strike was ongoing. However, when the strike collapsed, Rau was removed from office by the government.
Rau resumed his employment at Bosch in Feuerbach. During another general strike in several Württemberg cities, from 28 August to 4 September 1920, he led the strike committee in his firm, which resulted in his dismissal.
Influences From 1919 until 1920 Rau was head of the local KPD group in Zuffenhausen, and chaired the KPD organisation in Stuttgart. The party leader in Württemberg at this time was Edwin Hoernle. Hoernle had visited Rau's youth group in Zuffenhausen and had become a long-standing friend; he was an influential teacher for Rau and made his voluminous library available to Rau to use.For Edwin Hoernle (short biographies), see
For Hoernle as member of the ECCI in 1922, see: / Extraction:
The most outstanding ideological authority of the movement in Stuttgart, during the time of Rau's political involvement there, was however Clara Zetkin. She was a founding member of the Second International, about whom Friedrich Engels once had written, that he liked her very much, while emperor Wilhelm II is said to have referred to her as the "worst witch in Germany".For Engels' letter to Karl Marx' daughter Laura Lafargue, where he writes about Clara Zetkin, see / Extraction: Speech manuscript of a lecture by the Stuttgart local historian Dr. Hans-Georg Müller in Stuttgart-Sillenbuch on 16 November 1995. She had been living in a Stuttgart suburb since 1891 and, since then, been gathering a circle of Württemberg Marxists around her, among them Rau's friend Hoernle, who had been editing with her the magazine Die Gleichheit. Her house, built in 1903 in Sillenbuch (now a part of Stuttgart), had become a meeting place of leading national and local left-wing and communist activists. It was also visited by international communist leaders like Vladimir Lenin, who stayed there overnight in 1907. In 1920, when Zetkin was elected to the Reichstag in Berlin, Hoernle and Rau moved to Berlin as well.
Berlin
In November 1920 Rau became a full-time party functionary and the secretary of the agricultural division of the Central Committee of the KPD in Berlin. Between 1921 and 1930 he lectured at the Land and Federal schools of the KPD, and edited a few left-wing agricultural journals.
The head of the Central Committee's Division for Agriculture initially was Edwin Hoernle, with whom Rau had come from Stuttgart. Hoernle had been elected to the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) in November 1922 and Rau succeeded him as division chief the following year. Afterwards, Rau also became a leading member of various national and international left wing farmer and peasant organisations. From 1923 onward, he was a member of the Secretariat of the International Committee of the Agricultural and Forest Workers and beginning in 1924 of the executive committee of the Reich Peasant Federation (Reichsbauernbund). In 1930 this was followed with a membership on the International Peasants' Council in Moscow and in 1931 he became an office member of the European Peasant Committee. From 1928 to 1933 he was also member of the Preußischer Landtag, the Prussian federal state parliament. There he joined the committee on agricultural affairs of the parliament and became its chairman.
Imprisonment, International Brigades, World War II After Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 and the subsequent suppression of the KPD, Rau became a Central Committee's party instructor for southwest Germany and was active in building an underground party organisation there. On 23 May 1933 Rau was arrested and on 11 December 1934 convicted, together with Bernhard Bästlein, for "preparations to commit high treason" by the People's Court of Germany. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment. After his release from custody, he emigrated to the USSR in August 1935, via Czechoslovakia, and became a deputy chairman of the International Agrarian Institute in Moscow.
After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and following the formation of the International Brigades, Rau attended a school for military commanders in Ryazan (USSR), and subsequently went to Spain. After his arrival in April 1937, he joined the XI International Brigade and participated in the civil war as political commissar, beginning in May 1937, then as chief of staff and finally commander of the brigade, until March 1938, when he was injured. Although the brigade achieved some temporary successes during these months, Francisco Franco's troops were already on the road to victory. Rau's brigade saw combat in the battles of Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Aragon Offensive, where Rau was wounded. / Extraction: