Stefan Szende (born István Szende: 10 April 1901 – 5 May 1985) was a Hungaro-Swedish political scientist, politician, journalist and writer who during the Nazi years became an anti-fascist resistance fighter and a victim of the concentration camp system.
Life Hungarian provenance and early years István Szende was born in Szombathely, then on the western edge of the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary. Max Szende (1872–1921), his father, was an insurance company worker. With his elder brother László, István grew up in a prosperous liberal-Jewish family and acquired a sold classical education, largely free of Jewish religious elements. He attended school locally, moving on to a Roman Catholic secondary school. Szombathely was a multi-cultural city. His mother Elisabeth (1874–1944), who came from a German-speaking family, ensured that he grew up fluently bilingual, and he also learned a third language, French, to a high standard at school.
He later wrote that it was as a result of observing the material hardship of his own family's domestic servants, of reading the works of writers such as Émile Zola and Friedrich Nietzsche, and of the senseless carnage of the First World War battlefields that his political awareness was triggered while he was still at school. On leaving school he took a job as a bank clerk, but he soon abandoned this. Later in 1919 he both joined the Hungarian Communist Party and enrolled at the University of Vienna in order to study Philosophy, a career ambition which implied another decade of scholarship. It was around this time that he came under the influence of the Hungarian left-wing philosopher György Lukács.
Vienna and Budapest In the end, he stayed at Vienna University only till 1921, which was the year in which his father died. He returned to Hungary, which in 1918 had become a separate country. He did not return to Szombathely, however, but relocated to Budapest where his brother László, now a newly qualified architect, was living. Still aged only 20, he enrolled at the university, studying Law and Political sciences. By now he was finding publishers for book reviews and short essays. He also intensified his contacts with political intellectuals. After a brief period of radical and communist government, the new Hungarian state had become conservative and authoritarian which made open support for communism dangerous. Szende moved in socialist left-wing circles in which membership of the Social Democratic Party provided a mantle of acceptability for his continuing interest in Marxist philosophy, an area in which by now he was also lecturing.
He concluded his studies in 1924 and received his doctorate from Budapest University in 1925. By this time it seems that he was devoting more time to political activity. In 1926 he was arrested and accused of having "insulted the Minister for Justice" in an article he had written. On a second occasion, he was arrested for "inciting class hatred" in a lecture delivered to members of the Metal Workers' Trades Union, and accused of "insulting the national honour" in another article. Facing the prospect of a trial and a longer jail term, when he was released from investigative detention in 1928 he fled the country, emigrating a second time to Vienna. By this time his widowed mother and brother had distanced themselves from his political activity, and while they remained in Hungary, Stefan Szende, now in enforced exile, was stripped of his Hungarian nationality. He would remain legally stateless for the next twenty-two years. Supported by the Soviet sponsored International Red Aid workers' welfare organisation, he found his Viennese home, initially, in a refugee camp.
He met another Jewish refugee from Hungary at the refugee camp. Elisabeth "Erszi" Csillag (1901–1997) was an opera singer by training. The two of them married in 1929 and moved into a two-room city apartment, still receiving some financial support from International Red Aid, supplemented by occasional payments for published articles. Szende also resumed his academic career, returning to the study of philosophy. It was probably in 1930 that he received his second doctorate, this time from the University of Vienna.
Despite the Austrian doctorate, life in Vienna remained precarious. At the end of 1929, he was excluded from the Communist Party in the context of internal party splits that echoed political rivalries in Moscow that centred round Stalin. Exclusion from the party meant the loss of most of his social contacts, many friends, and separation from what he regarded as his natural political home. On a more practical level, once he had concluded his studies the authorities would no longer extend his residence permit. He, therefore, decided to move again, this time to Berlin. Initially, he was not accompanied by Erszi who was by now pregnant, and who returned to Hungary where she stayed with her mother. Accordingly, while Stefan Szende was trying to become established in Berlin, on 26 November 1930 the couple's daughter, Barbara Cecilia, who later became a physician, was born in Budapest.
Berlin In Berlin Szende rented a small room on the south side of the city centre (Hallesches Tor). He was short of money and hungry. His expulsion the previous year from the Communist Party meant there was no instant network of supportive comrades. In the end it was through his wife, still in Budapest, that he gained an entry into the socialist milieu through an old friend from Yugoslavia who was living in Berlin. He was introduced to Kostja Zetkin whose mother, Clara Zetkin, despite having herself been recently been excluded from the Communist Party, was already an iconic figure for the German left. On Clara Zetkin's recommendation he joined the newly formed Communist Party of Germany - Opposition (" Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands" / KPO), an alternative Communist Party set up by some of those excluded by the increasingly hardline Communist Party of Germany. He was not hugely active within the PO, but he nevertheless later recalled that his time in it had provided a welcome release from the "social fascism precepts" ("Sozialfaschismusthese") characteristic of the mainstream communist parties as politics became more polarised. Through the KPO he was also able to gain an extensive knowledge of the German labour movement and a deep understanding of the political currents of the time. This provided a sound basis for his own future political development and helped him read the unfolding political situation as it evolved through the 1930s.
In 1932 the KPO itself split apart. Stefan Szende, along with Jacob Walcher, Paul Frölich and August Enderle, was among approximately 1,000 members who transferred from the KPO to the new Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD). The SAPD originated as a desperate move to unite the political left in order to confront and block the seemingly unstoppable advance of populist nationalism represented by the National Socialist German Workers' Party ("Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" / Nazi Party). Szende got to know the SAPD leader, Max Köhler, after which he became far more politically active in the SAPD than he had been in the KPO. One young member of the SAPD was Herbert Karl Frahm, later known as Willy Brandt, who would write of Szende's strong intellectual and spiritual leadership within the party's Berlin group ("[er hat] ... eine geistig führende Rolle in unserer Berliner Gruppe gespielt"").Willy Brandt: Links und frei. Mein Weg 1930 - 1950. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 2012, , p. 102.
Nazi Germany The Nazi take-over at the start of 1933 completely changed the political backdrop, and after the Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933 the new government accelerated the transformation of Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Having already anticipated that the period of Nazi government would be no passing trend, but a sustained and long-term threat, the SAPD was in many ways better prepared to transform itself into an underground movement than the larger Communist Party and SPD. Szende was quick to respond to the challenge of sustaining party political work under conditions of illegality. His choice of a party cover name, "Stefan", nevertheless indicates a certain naivete in aspects of his approach. In August 1933 the Gestapo broke the national leadership of the SAPD, which included the arrest of the party's Berlin region leader, Max Köhler. Stefan Szende now took over the party leadership in Berlin.
He himself was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 November 1933. As a survivor, he was later able to write about his experiences during the ensuing months in considerable detail. Other SAPD party activists were arrested at the same time. Since Szende was both the leader, for Berlin, of the illegal SAPD and a foreign stateless Jew, he was in particular danger from the sinister fantastical obsessions of his captors.Those arrested were taken to the "Maikowski House", a former trades union building in Berlin-Charlottenburg which had been taken over as a head office by local Nazi para-militaries (SA). His interrogators included Karl Ernst and Prince August Wilhelm, a younger son of the former Kaiser. During the next few weeks Szende was repeatedly interrogated and badly tortured, but the torturers, for reasons of their own, took care to see to it that he did not actually die. He was repeatedly asked about his part in the international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in which the interrogators insisted he was involved. They also repeatedly asked him about his connections with Leon Trotsky who at this stage was evidently demonised by the followers of Hitler just as thoroughly as by the followers of Stalin.
On 1 December 1933 the SAPD prisoners were transferred to the "Columbia House" concentration camp at Berlin-Tempelhof where nightly torture sessions by the SS guards were part of the routine. For interrogation sessions, Szende was taken to the Gestapo main office at Prince Albrecht Street 8 where his lead interrogator, Commissar von Plotho, had special responsibility for investigating the SAPD members. Szende was again identified as a Jewish intellectual foreigner and as a socialist, which meant he was singled out for special persecution back in the "Columbia House" concentration camp. By this time he was suffering not merely from the daily beatings at the concentration camp, but also from the long term injuries to his genitals, which were treated cruelly and painfully with Silver nitrite by a doctor who was entirely open in sharing his conviction that his patient was a member of the International Jewish Conspiracy.
Christmas 1933 and the new year holiday passed largely unremarked, but on 5 January 1934 the prisoners were moved again, now to the newly opened Oranienburg concentration camp a short distance to the north of the city. Szende's description of their welcome at Oranienburg closely mirrors the experiences of others: it involved verbal abuse and beating along with more "refined torture scenes" in the showers. Most internees were allowed periods of rest, but Jews were singled out for a more relentless routine. On his first day at the camp Szende was taken to the infamous "Room 16" where he had his first encounter with Obersturmführer Hans Stahlkopf, who held a position of responsibility at the Oranienburg concentration camp.