Franz Dahlem (14 January 1892 – 17 December 1981) was a German communist politician who was a leading official of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Dahlem helped establish the SED and German Democratic Republic, and held senior positions in the Volkskammer and SED Central Committee.
Dahlem participated in the German revolution of 1918-19 and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the Weimar Republic, serving as a KPD member in the Landtag of Prussia from 1921 to 1924 and the Reichstag from 1928 to 1933. Dahlem went into exile in France during the Nazi period and continued KPD activities until the end of the Second World War. Dahlem became well-known and popular in the SED leadership by the early 1950s and was seen by some as a possible rival to Walter Ulbricht. Dahlem was one of several high-ranking SED officials to be removed from power by Ulbricht after the Uprising of 1953. Dahlem was formally rehabilitated by the SED in 1956, serving on the Central Committee from 1957 until his retirement in 1974.
Early life Franz Dahlem was born on 14 January 1892 in Rohrbach bei Bitsch, a small town in Alsace–Lorraine, into a Low German-speaking Roman Catholic family. His father, Jacques Pierre Dahlem, was a railway worker. After attending middle school in Château-Salins, he went on to senior school at Sarreguemines, where his school career was curtailed due to lack of money. He was also a member of the Catholic Youth League at Sarreguemines between 1908 and 1911. He undertook a traineeship as an export salesman in Saarbrücken between 1911 and 1913. and / or Cologne In 1913, Dahlem joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD)., remaining a member of it until 1917.
Dahlem, despite his opposition to the First World War, served in the Imperial German Army between 1914 and 1918. However, when the SPD split in 1917, primarily over the issue of party support for continuing its support for the government line over the war, he chose the breakaway anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). That year he was wounded in action while serving on the Eastern Front and, after being transferred to Macedonia, developed malaria which led to several periods in hospital.
In 1919, Dahlem married Käthe Weber, who shared in his political beliefs and activism.
Weimar Republic
Following the war, Dahlem was involved in the German Revolution of 1918–19 and joined the workers' and soldiers' councils, initially in Allenstein in East Prussia, and subsequently in Cologne, participating in support of implementation of the slogan "All power to the councils" ("Alle Macht den Räten!"). He also co-founded and became the editor of , a USPD newspaper in which he powerfully advocated the party's membership of the Comintern and a party merger with the new Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He also served, between 1919 and 1923, as a Cologne city councillor.
In December 1920, Dahlem took part in the "unification party conference" at which the radical "left wing" of the USPD merged with the KPD to form what was briefly known as the (VKPD). Here, together with Philipp Fries and Henriette Ackermann, he was elected to the local party leadership of the Middle Rhine region. He also briefly represented Middle Rhine nationally on the party Central Committee. In 1921, he was forced to surrender editorship of the Sozialistische Republik following his opposition to the March Action, but during 1921/22 he briefly edited the Berlin-based Internationalen Presse-Korrespondenz. When the French Army occupied the occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, Dahlem helped to organise "resistance to French and German imperialism" and sent by the party leadership to Paris in order to coordinate with the French Communist Party against the common enemy. From 1923, he was working in the Organisation Department of the party Central Committee. He was particularly effective in the application of "Leninist principles" to party organisation. In 1927, he himself joined the Central Committee, becoming a member of its Politburo just two years later. He also served briefly as political leader in Thuringia in 1924.
In addition to party work, Dahlem held several legislative offices in the Weimar Republic, sitting as a member in the Landtag of Prussia between 1921 and 1924, and as a member of the Reichstag, representing the Potsdam electoral district, between 1928 and 1933.
Recurring fragmentation was a feature of German left-wing politics in general and of the KPD in particular during the 1920s. One reason Dahlem was sent to Berlin in 1921 to edit the Internationalen Presse-Korrespondenz was to enforce his separation from Central Committee members in his Rhineland home patch at a time when he was opposing the party leadership. Areas of contention included both the party's attitude to the competing factions of Soviet communism during the Russian Civil War and the practical issue of how fast to progress the party's revolutionary objectives after what was seen as the failure of the revolution of 1918–1919. After 1923, with Grigory Zinoviev sidelined in Moscow and Joseph Stalin's control becoming more absolute, there was no longer any question of the KPD having to choose between competing versions of Soviet communism, and the party became more focused domestically. Dahlem was closely aligned with the strategy of the KPD leader Ernst Thälmann during a further period of internal fragmentation at the end of the 1920s. Thälmann's strategy, centered on the "social fascism" theory, was variously seen either as a determined policy to unite the working class behind the party in order to resist the rising Nazi Party, or else as an aggressive and sustained assault on the centre-left SPD which created a bitter division on the political left through which helped the Nazis find their path to power. In November 1930, Thälmann suggested that Dahlem take over the leadership of the Revolutionary Trades Union Opposition. He retained this function until he was replaced by Fritz Schulte in June 1932; Dahlem had supported Heinz Neumann in challenging Thälmann's focus on attacking the SPD.
Nazi period and exile The Nazis took power in January 1933 and they quickly began to establish a one-party dictatorship, putting members of the KPD in danger. Dahlem was one of approximately 40 party leaders who attended the on 7 February 1933 at the , a restaurant in the countryside just outside Berlin to the south. The meeting later achieved iconic status as the last meeting of the KPD until after 1945, and in 1953 the restaurant itself had been taken over and converted into a memorial centre. By that time many of those who had met in February 1933 had been killed or died in concentration camps.
In May 1933, under instructions from the party leadership, Dahlem himself fled to Paris with Wilhelm Pieck und Wilhelm Florin, which quickly became the de facto headquarters of the KPD. In 1934, he had taken French citizenship, which he would retain until 1941. His own membership of the Central Committee was confirmed in 1935, following internal party ructions during the early 1930s. In 1939, he was back in the party Politburo.
Dahlem was back in Berlin (secretly and illegally) between February and July 1934, undertaking "political work". Much of his activity was involved in trying to build and strengthen an , a left-wing anti-Nazi resistance organisation. In July 1935, he took part in the 7th World Congress of the Comintern. In 1936, after he had been undertaking "party work" in Prague for some months, he was stripped of his German citizenship. By 1937, the Spanish Civil War was becoming, for adherents of both sides, the fulcrum of the struggle between fascism and communism. Between 1936 and 1938, Dahlem was in charge of the Central Political Commission of the International Brigades in Spain. In 1938/39, he took over as leader of the Central Committee secretariat of the KPD in its Paris exile, in succession to Walter Ulbricht whose by this time, when not in Spain, was spending most of his time not in Paris but in the Soviet Union. Dahlem took the lead in preparing for and running the in Paris, which took place in February 1939.
Second World War In September 1939, the Wehrmacht launched its invasion of Poland, beginning the Second World War. The French government responded immediately by declaring war on Nazi Germany. For most people in Paris, it would be another eight months before the Battle of France fully impacted their daily life, but refugees from political persecution in Germany were affected sooner than most. Dahlem was one of thousands who were arrested, and he was placed in the concentration camp at Camp Vernet in the southwest of the country. He immediately communicated to French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, offering the services of the KPD to the French Army and calling for close cooperation against the Nazis, but the offer was countermanded by the Comintern in Moscow. Meanwhile, his wife Käthe, who had accompanied her husband to Paris, relocated to Toulouse where, living illegally under the false name "Cathérine Dallerey", she acted as treasurer for the local KPD branch in exile between 1940 and 1944. It is known that she had contacts with the French Communist Party in the area and that she was in touch with party comrades interned at Camp Vernet. In 1941, while still at camp, Dahlen took Soviet citizenship. During the first part of 1941, a large group of German International Brigades veterans were liberated by members of the French Resistance from Camp Vernet, where security was poor. Dahlem was not one of those freed in this break-out, however, and the Gestapo ordered the Vichy government to hand him over immediately.
In October 1941, he was one of approximately 20 German prisoners removed to a secret prison at Castres. by the SS and handed over to the Gestapo. He was transferred to Berlin in August 1942, and spent the next eight months in the Gestapo headquarters bunker there. After this, he was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Upper Austria. According to one source, he survived his internment at Mauthausen only because of the solidarity shown to him by fellow veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Because of his Comintern involvement and his participation in Spain, Dahlen had a high-profile internationally at this time. In the United Kingdom in early 1942, a petition was signed by 350 people, including 98 members of the House of Commons and 40 members of the House of Lords, calling for the release of Dahlen, Luigi Longo and other opponents of the Nazi regime imprisoned at Castres.Jonny Granzow: Der Ausbruch der Spanienkämpfer aus dem Geheimgefängnis: Eine historische Reportage. edition bodoni, 2012, , p. 62
German Democratic Republic