Paul Merker (1 February 1894 – 13 May 1969) was a German trade unionist and politician of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) who later became a leading official of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED).
Merker featured for several years in the show trial culture of the time, placed under a lengthy investigation process that formally began in 1950, and jailed for eight years as a spy in 1955. Released less than a year later, he appeared as a reluctant witness against his friend Walter Janka at another show trial in 1957.
Biography
Early years
Paul Merker was born near Meissen in Kingdom of Saxony, in what was then the stand-alone municipality of Oberlößnitz on 1 February 1894. In 1934, however, Oberlößnitz was subsumed into Radebeul. Born into a Protestant family,Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard UP, 1997; deutsche Fass. siehe Lit.) after leaving school Merker worked as a waiter and as a hotel worker. He was still working as a wine waiter, by now in Hamburg, in 1923.
He was a member of a Christian trades union from 1912 till 1918, before joining a "Free" (i.e. more expressly socialist) trades union from 1919. Between 1914 and 1918 he was stationed a soldier at Sandhofen (Mannheim) and then in the air-ship section at Yambol (in Bulgaria), where the Germans maintained an air-ship base for surveillance and with a view to bombing targets in Russia, Rumania and Sudan. While serving in the military Merker was arrested and imprisoned for six months for distributing (presumably subversive) leaflets.
Trades union activity and left-wing politics
In 1918 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and in 1920 he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Until 1922 he worked as a trades union official.
Between 1923 and 1924 he served as the KPD regional secretary for the West Saxony district, and from 1924 till 1932 he was a deputy in the Prussian regional legislative assembly. From 1927 till 1930, and again between 1934 and 1945, he was a member of the KPD Central Committee and Politburo. As before, during the later 1920s the focus of his work was on the trades union section of the party. From 1929 he held the position of National Leader of Revolutionary Trades Union opposition RGO"."Reichsleiters der Revolutionären Gewerkschaftsopposition" (RGO)Vgl. zu Details Stefan Heinz: Moskaus Söldner? Der "Einheitsverband der Metallarbeiter Berlins": Entwicklung und Scheitern einer kommunistischen Gewerkschaft, Hamburg 2010, S. 89 ff., 94 ff., 277 ff.
Merker was dismissed from the Central Committee and Politburo in April 1930 on account of his "extremist left-wing deviations" ("linksopportunistischer Abweichungen"). This happened after criticism from the influential Central Committee member Hermann Remmele, published in "Die Internationale", of the "ultra-left excesses of Social fascism" which Merker represented."die von ihm vertretene "ultralinke" Zuspitzung des Sozialfaschismus-Begriffs"Siehe Remmele, Hermann, Schritt halten! Warum muss der Kampf gegen zwei Fronten gerichtet werden?, in: Die Internationale, Jg. 13, Nr. 5/6, S. 135-158 (Fortsetzungen in Heft 7, S. 198-221, Heft 8/9, S. 230-259, Heft 10, S. 295-313). He was also obliged to surrender his leadership of the RGO in favour of Fritz Emrich. Merker now occupied second tier positions in the party and in 1931 was made available to the Communist International, which prepared the way for a period working outside Germany.
The United States, the Soviet Union, and a return to the party Between March 1931 and May 1933 Merker's services were contracted to the Comintern. He worked in the United States, using the cover name "Max Fischer", as an advisor to the Communist Party there. In the summer of 1933 he relocated to Leningrad. At the start of 1934 he returned to Germany to work illegally, and resumed active membership of the (by now illegal) Revolutionary Trades Union opposition (RGO)". Between 1934 and 1935 he was a member of the illegal Berlin regional leadership of the Communist Party in succession to . Between 1935 and 1939 Merker was again elected to the KPD Central Committee and Politburo although the party itself had been banned in Germany since 1933.
France After a wave of arrests started in 1935 the Communists made no attempt to create a new leadership structure within the German borders. From February 1937 Paul Merker was a member of the Central Committee of the (German) KPD which was now operating from Paris, taking responsibility for party operations in all the countries where party members were no longer able to operate. The Paris-based leadership was therefore also carrying out functions on behalf of The Party within Germany. After Walter Ulbricht left Paris, Paul Merker was briefly heading up the party secretariat alone, before July 1938 after which he did the work in partnership with Franz Dahlem.
Immediately after the Second World War began, the Paris-based party secretariat made an application for legitimization on behalf of the communist emigrants living illegally in France, in order that these might register with the French authorities.Siehe , Der deutsche Kommunismus. Selbstverständnis und Realität. Band 3. Im Krieg (1939-1945), Berlin 2009, S. 22. The decision to do this formed an important strand in the criminal investigation which was launched against Merker in 1952 and ensuing show trial of 1955, because for many of the affected emigrants it led to immediate internment which was frequently followed, once France had come under German occupation in 1940, by transfer to a concentration camp and, not infrequently, early death.Die Sicht eines Beteiligten bei Dahlem, Franz, Am Vorabend des zweiten Weltkrieges. 1938 bis August 1939. Erinnerungen, Berlin 1977, Band 2, S. 423-433. Merker himself was interned in 1940 and sent, initially, to Camp Vernet, west of Perpignan, and which was now operating as a concentration camp. Here he remained till February 1941 when he was transferred to the internment camp at Les Milles, not far from Marseille. At Les Milles he was permitted to leave the camp during the daytime.
Returning to the camp on the evening of 1 July 1941, Merker was intercepted by a fellow Communist detainee, , who informed him of a threat to hand him over to the Gestapo. Merker, together with Walter Janka, and Georg Stibi now disappeared underground.
Mexico In June 1942, with help from Noel Field, he managed to escape from Marseille to Mexico which was becoming home to a considerable number of exiled German communists at this time. Here he occupied himself as secretary to the Latin-American Committee of the "Free Germany" ("Freies Deutschland") movement, regularly producing articles for the Freies Deutschland News sheet.
Merker benefitted from the assistance of Mexican diplomats, especially, the Mexican consul-general, Gilberto Bosques, to escape.
Merker spoke up, in particular, for a comprehensive compensation package for Jewish survivors of Nazi anti-semitic policies: "If all German rivers ran with ink, and all German forest were made of quill pens, there still would not be enough of either to describe sufficiently the numberless crimes that the Hitler Fascism has committed on the Jewish population.""Wenn alle deutschen Fluesse Tinte und alle deutschen Waelder Federstiele waeren, so wuerden sie nicht ausreichen, um die unzaehligen Verbrechen zu beschreiben, die der Hitlerfaschismus gegen die juedische Bevoelkerung begangen hat. ... Nur diejenigen Antifaschisten koennen sich freisprechen von der Verantwortung fuer die ungeheuerlichen Folgen des Antisemitismus, die seit Hitlers Machtuebernahme unablaessig ihre Freiheit und ihr Leben aufs Spiel setzten im Kampfe gegen die maechtig aufsteigende Finsternis und gegen die Reaktion, die im Hitlerfaschismus ihren Blutgipfel erreichte. ... Sie sind es, die, erfuellt von den Idealen ihres Kampfes fuer den Fortschritt des Menschengeschlechts freiwillig die Verantwortung uebernehmen, dass die an ihren juedischen Mitbuergern veruebten Verbrechen – soweit das ueberhaupt moeglich ist – wieder gutgemacht werden."Paul Merker (1942): Hitlers Antisemitismus und wir, in: Freies Deutschland, 1. Jg., Nr. 11. Oktober, Pages 9-11.
Back to (East) Germany
In 1946 Paul Marker returned to Germany, where he became a member of the Party Committee, the Central secretariat and the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), a new political party formed in the part of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union, by forcibly merging the old KPD and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) parties. He also promptly became a member of the Brandenburg regional legislative assembly.
In March 1948 he became a member of the (at this stage still provisional) People's Chamber (national legislature) / Volkskammer of the German Democratic Republic, retaining his seat there till August 1950. Between 1949 and 1950 Merker was the new country's Secretary of State for Agriculture. Between 1946 and 1949, jointly with Helmut Lehmann, he headed up the (East) "German Labour and Social Welfare Administration" ("Deutsche Verwaltung für Arbeit und Sozialfürsorge", renamed in 1948 "Hauptverwaltung für Arbeit und Sozialfürsorge")
1950 career crisis
A member of the nation's core leadership team
During the early years of the SED Paul Merker appears to have been at the heart of East Germany's ruling party. As the country's political parties were reconfigured in 1946 he was one of just seven KPD members chosen to join the fourteen member SED secretariat, and following a further reconfiguration of the party organisation in 1949 he moved on to join the Politburo, at the summit of the SED's power structure.see Malycha, Andreas, Partei von Stalins Gnaden? Die Entwicklung der SED zur Partei neuen Typs in den Jahren 1946 bis 1950, Berlin 1996, Pages 68 & 109. In conversations held during the final year of his life with the historian Merker nevertheless insisted that he did not participate in the central policy decisions; from 1948 he had the sense that he had no future within the party leadership.see , Partner im "Narrenparadies". Der Freundeskreis um Noel Field und Paul Merker, Berlin 1994, P 14.
Rivalry and festering mistrust Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader was one of a relatively tight-knit group of German communists who spent the war in Moscow, and then turned up in Germany at the end of April 1945 on a nation building mission, mandated by the Soviet leadership: Ulbricht would always remain close to Moscow. Current knowledge suggests that Stalin's mistrust of Paul Merker dated back at least to 1940, when Merker had shared with Comintern and KPD colleagues in Moscow criticism concerning the August 1939 Non-aggression pact between the Germans and the Soviets. It was an opinion he shared even more forcefully in the presence of Anton Ackermann, who later reported a 1939 meeting of the exiled KPD that had taken place in Paris directly following announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, which Merker had characterized as an "unimaginably crass and shambolic anti-Soviet failing",...zu einem "wüsten, unvorstellbar krassen antisowjetischen Ausfall"see , Partner im "Narrenparadies". Der Freundeskreis um Noel Field und Paul Merker, Berlin 1994, P 18. in a peroration that had lasted for several minutes and which was felt to have "shown the true face" of Paul Merker. According to the historian Norman Naimark, Merker was by 1950 seen by the Soviets as an advocate for a more radical approach by the ruling SED, and he was thought to be sympathetic with "sectarianist" former KPD members who had cooperated in the merger with the SPD only reluctantly, and many of whom still exercised significant influence at a regional and local level.See Naimark, Norman M., Die Russen in Deutschland. Die Sowjetische Besatzungszone 1945 bis 1949, Berlin 1999, P. 545.