Karl Schirdewan (14 May 1907 – 14 July 1998) was a German anti-fascist activist who after World War II became a high-ranking politician of the SED, later becoming disgraced for his outspoken critique of the party from a communist perspective.
During the mid 1950s, Schirdewan was seen as a potential successor to Walter Ulbricht but fell out of favour in 1958. Ulbricht continued to lead the government until 1971, while 1958 was the year in which Schirdewan was thrown out of the Politburo and placed in charge of the National Archives at Potsdam, a position from which he retired in 1964 or 1965. He would only be rehabilitated by the SED's successor party, the PDS, after the Wende.
Biography
Early years Schirdewan was born in Stettin,Certain English language obituaries give his birth place as Königsberg. However, earlier and later sources - most sources - including the oration given at his funeral, give his birth place as Stettin. an industrial port city which at that time was the capital of the Prussian Province of Pomerania. His mother's name was Josephine Arentz. His father's identity is unknown, but interviewed in 1994 Schirdewan stated that he believed his father had died shortly after his own birth. Karl Schirdewan spent time living in an orphanage and then moved through a succession of foster families. He acquired the name by which he was subsequently identified when he was adopted by Robert and Martha Schirdewan in 1914. His step-parents both worked, in administrative/custodial capacities, at the Botanical Institute in Breslau, but in 1918 his step-mother died of tuberculosis, and his relationship with his step-father's new wife never became close. Karl Schirdewan left school when he was 16 and looked, without success, for work in a book shop. He then, in 1922, began a commercial apprenticeship with a grain company: this occupied him till 1924 when the company went bankrupt. Later, between 1926 and 1929, he worked as an office assistant and as messenger. At one stage he was employed as a transport worker, and there were also periods of unemployment, notably between 1929 and 1931.
Communist Party of Germany On the political front, Schirdewan joined the Young Communist League (KJVD) in 1923, aged 16, and the Breslau branch of the Communist Party itself in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 he was employed with the KJVD as an official, in September 1929 voted onto the organisation's central committee, and appointed chairman of the Silesian regional Communist Party branch. In 1931/32 he took over the publishing department of the party's "Junge Garde" newspaper, also becoming co-editor; this represented his first senior party position.
Following feuding within the local communist leadership, Friedrich Schlotterbeck and Karl Schirdewan were relieved of their party functions in Silesia in the autumn of 1931; Schierdewan subsequently took over as chairman of the KJVD in the important East Prussia region. He returned to Berlin at the end of 1932, and became head of the KJVD’s Antimilitärischer Apparat.
In the KPD Underground and Concentration Camps - 1933-1945 In January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the NSDAP officially came to power. This opened the way for a rapid transition to one-party dictatorship. In March of that year emergency legislation enabled the government to act without reference to the Reichstag (national parliament). This followed the Reichstag Fire, which the Nazi regime used as a pretense to round up hundreds of thousands of political opponents into the first concentration camps. Membership of the Communist Party became illegal, with all other political parties, trade unions, and many social organizations also outlawed within the year. Karl Schirdewan nevertheless continued with his (now illegal) party activities in Saxony and in the north of Germany. On 19 February 1934, he was arrested in Hamburg and taken to Berlin's "Columbia House" concentration camp. On 10 May 1934, he was sentenced by the special "People's Court" to three years in prison: the charge was the usual one under the circumstances of "conspiracy of high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"). He served his sentence at Coswig, near Dresden. In 1937, his sentence served, Karl Schirdewan was taken into "protective custody." He remained imprisoned until the end of the war and the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945, spending most of his time in the concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps. On 23 April 1945, he was freed by US forces while on a forced march, as the regime abandoned and rushed to try and destroy concentration camps in eastern parts of the country, which were being over-run by Soviet forces.
Post-war Soviet occupation zone
The Second World War ended, in Europe, in May 1945. Schirdewan resumed his work for the Communist Party, in June 1945 re-establishing and starting to build up the party branch in northern Bavaria. Two months later, in August, he joined the Berlin-based Party Central Committee. Directly following the contentious merger that in April 1946, created the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED), he was a member of the leadership committee ("Parteivorstand") of what by 1949 would become the ruling party in a new German one- party dictatorship. During 1946/47, however, his political engagement was unavoidably compromised by illness, as a result of which a stay in a Berlin Hospital was followed by a period in the Sülzhayn Sanatorium.
In 1947, he became the leader of a working group on the "Study of illegal party history" ("Studium der illegalen Parteigeschichte"), mandated to gather information on the attitudes of party comrades to the Nazi period. In practice, as Schirdewan later recalled, the group's work involved combing through Gestapo files to gather information on anti-fascists - Communists and Socialists - who had been targets for government information gathering during the twelve Nazi years. The information would be used after 1949 in support of political purges of the SED. In January 1949, when party membership had reached 1,773,000, the party was purged of 23,000 "class enemies", in an exercise which evidently made use of the work undertaken by Schirdewan's working group.
When the SED party was created in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 through a merger of the Communist Party and the more moderately left-wing SPD, the intention in Moscow seems to have been to accomplish something similar in the other military occupation zones further to the west and south. In (East) Berlin the SED operated, from the outset, a "West Germany" desk headed up by Franz Dahlem. Two senior officials with suitable diplomatic and intellectual abilities worked for Dahlem on liaison with the residual Communist Party in the British and US occupation zones. Schirdewan was the man entrusted with liaison in the British zone. By 1949, however, it was becoming clear that imposing a Soviet-style solution across the western zones of Germany would not be possible without successful prosecution of another major war, and as the party structures adapted to this reality it was no more than part of a natural progression that in February 1949 Karl Schirdewan was appointed as deputy head of the "Westkommission", described by one authority as an operation "looking for ways to win over West German politicians for the Communist cause". In 1950 he was appointed to head up the newly "West department" (Westabteilung) within the Party Central Committee.
German Democratic Republic In October 1949, partly in response to the creation of the German Federal Republic (West Germany) five months earlier, Germany's Soviet administered zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a stand-alone Soviet sponsored German states with constitutional arrangements increasingly modeled on those of the Soviet Union itself. Schirdewan's experience on the political front-line with West Germany and his Central Committee responsibilities for the "West Department" effectively made him the leader of the East German ruling party's on-going Social Democratic Action Sozialdemokratische Aktion / (SDA) project.
1952 was the year in which the German Democratic Republic abolished the regional tier of government, and it was the year in which Karl Schirdewan was appointed First Secretary of the party leadership in Saxony in succession to Ernst Lohagen. With the abolition of Saxony as a regional power hub politically, later that year he became First Secretary of the party leadership in the important Leipzig region, a post he held till 1957. Nationally, although he had been working closely with the Party Central Committee since the party's foundation, it was only in May 1953 that Karl Schirdewan was himself co-opted as a member, following the disgrace and expulsion from it of Wilhelm Zaisser and Rudolf Herrnstadt, on 17 June 1953 also taking Zaisser's place in the Politburo. He now acquired various further powers and responsibilities, serving from 26 July 1953 as head of the Central Committee's newly created "Chief Organ of the Party and of Mass Movements" ("Leitende Organe der Partei u. der Massenorganisationen"), and from 1954 as a member of the Central Committee's "Security Commission".
The mid 1950s were the high point of Karl Schirdewan's political career. Sources refer to him as the "Second Man" ("zweiter Mann"), second only to Walter Ulbricht in the national hierarchy. It was always obvious to him, as he later recalled, that he had achieved his eminence because of the Soviet Union and not because of Walter Ulbricht. The two men loathed one another. Schirdewan described Ulbricht as a "happy intriguer" ("Intrigant Fröhlich") and was known to have been close to senior East German politicians, such as Anton Ackermann and Paul Merker, who had experienced enforced career-breaks or worse, after falling out with Ulbricht.
Relations with Nikita Khrushchev