Hermann Axen (6 March 1916 – 15 February 1992) was a German communist politician who held several high-ranking positions in the Socialist Unity Party between 1949 and 1989. He became involved in the German resistance to Nazi rule, spending much of that time in state detention, including Auschwitz. After the war he became a prominent politician in the Soviet occupation zone, reorganized in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). He served as a relatively high-profile member of the powerful Politburo of the Central Committee between 1970 and 1989.
In November 1989, Axen visited Moscow for eye surgery. While he was away, the entire Politburo (of which he was a member) resigned on 8 November 1989, and he too was excluded from it. On his return in January 1990 he was arrested, suspected of corruption and abuse of public office. This dramatic reversal of fortune came during a period of rapid political change. At the time of his death the arrest warrant had been rescinded and the case against him remained unproven, the necessary investigations having been delayed or suspended in response to his declining health.
Life Provenance and early years Hermann Axen was born in Leipzig. His father worked as a sales representative. His schooling took him to the which in the eyes of British historian David Childs made him a "grammar school boy". His family background was evidently an intellectual one: a source mentions his father's large private library. The family adhered to the liberal branch of Judaism and he received a Bar Mitzvah. A year later he horrified his parents by renouncing religion. Two years after that (and less than a year before the Nazi take-over), influenced by his brother , he joined the Young Communists.
Nazi Germany He was affected by his brother's murder by the Gestapo which took place, following torture, at the in Dresden on 23 September 1933.The date of Rudolf Aksen's death comes from his grave stone Rudolf's body was promptly handed over to his parents following the killing. According to a personal "curriculum vitae" compiled by Axen in 1949 and later found in his "party file", his parents were killed by the Nazis after 1939/40 in "the ghetto" or concentration camp near Lviv/Lemberg. The coming to power of the Nazis at the start of 1933 had been followed by a rapid transition to one-party dictatorship which meant that any political activity outside the Nazi Party, and in particular political activity on behalf of the banned Communist Party, became illegal. Rudolf Axen, until his killing, was leader of the underground Communist group in East Saxony. Axen undertook a course at the Marxist Workers' Academy ("Marxistische Arbeiterschule" / "MASch") in Leipzig during 1932/33 after which he took on a leadership role in the youth section in the party's Leipzig subdistrict ("Unterbezirk Leipzig"). As a seventeen year old, in Nazi Germany he served, in the words of one admiring source, as an illegal resistance worker, a "party instructor" and a party contact ("Verbindungsmann") in Saxony.
Between March and November 1934 he undertook and completed a commercial apprenticeship with Hoffner, Moses & Co., a fur trading company. By June 1934 he was also responsible for agitation and propaganda ("Agitprop") for the local leadership for Leipzig-West of the underground Young Communists, identified among comrades by the code names "Max" and, subsequently, "Friedrich". In September 1934 he joined the Young Communists' Leipzig region leadership team ("Bezirksleitung"). The group had by this point been effectively destroyed through arrests, and Axen now teamed up with a fellow young communist called Heinz Mißlitz to try and rebuild it.
Axen was arrested, along with fourteen comrades, on 3 November 1934. He now presented himself as a Polish citizen and a disciple of the "Mosaic religious community". His papers were sufficiently convincing for the arrest to prompt an intervention by the Polish consulate in Leipzig. On 20 June 1935 he faced the district high court in Dresden. The charge was the usual one of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"). He was convicted and sentenced to a three-year jail term which he served in the at Zwickau. He had already served seven months of his sentence while in pre-trial investigatory detention, and he was accordingly released in November 1937. Possibly on account of having presented himself to the authorities as a Polish citizen three years earlier, but possibly simply on account of his Communist activism and his Jewish family provenance, by this time he had been stripped of any residual German citizenship rights, and his release was made conditional on his immediately leaving the country.
French exile Now stateless, and with the agreement of the party, he at once headed for Vienna, following a route which involved travelling via Poland. By this time, however, it was no secret that the German leader, backed on this point by widespread popular support in Germany and, more importantly, Austria, saw the independent Austrian state as an anomaly: with "Anschluss" looming ever larger on the horizon, in January 1938 Axen fled to Paris which since 1933, had served informally as one of two headquarter locations for the German Communist Party in exile. For the next couple of years, till 1940, he took casual work, employed in a support capacity in a range of businesses, while at the same time undertaking courier jobs for members of the illegal German Communist Party leadership. From April 1938 he was taking on "Red Aid" jobs for the (German) Young Communists. He also undertook translation jobs for "German Freedom Radio 29.8" ("Deutsche Freiheitssender 29,8").
From a Paris perspective the Second World War broke out in September 1939, when the German army invaded Poland and the French and British governments reacted by declaring war on Germany, but on the streets of Paris little changed till May 1940 when the Germans rapidly over-ran northern France. The authorities responded (as in England) by summarily identifying a large number of German political and race refugees from Nazism as enemy aliens and interning them, in the first instance, in a large Paris football stadium and subsequently in the Drancy internment camp. Possibly in connection with his legal stateless status, Axen avoided this fate and managed to escape to the southern half of France where a puppet government had been established under the leadership of the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. However, still in May 1940 he was identified as a "stateless communist", arrested and interned in Camp Vernet, a vast holding camp in the mountains to the west of Perpignan, previously used to house returning fighters from the Spanish Civil War. In June 1940 the authorities reassigned the camp which was now to be used to accommodate "all foreigners considered suspect or dangerous to the public order". By the end of May 1940 it is estimated that Axen was one of at least 250 of the Camp Vernet inmates who were German-speaking political exiles, and the two years he spent at the camp afforded significant networking opportunities with men some of whom would become leading members of the political establishment in the German Democratic Republic after 1949.
Concentration camps Over the next couple of years the Vichy government was increasingly marginalised, and by 1942 Gestapo officers were a regular sight on the streets of the cities in southern France. Security at Vernet no longer relied simply on its extremely remote location, and the camp was being described as a holding centre for Jewish families awaiting deportation to Nazi labour and extermination camps. In August 1942 Axen and various other internees picked out as Jewish communists, including Kurt Goldstein were handed over to the Gestapo, sent to the Paris area and placed on "Convoy 18 (12 August 1942)", one of the trains which, since March of that year, had been rolling across to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Silesia. He was held for more than two days at the main Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before being allocated to a sub-camp at Jawischowitz (as it was known to the Germans) where for more than two years he was set to work underground in the coal mines. It is recorded in sources that here he was a leader of the illegal camp committee.
At least one source warns that as Axen rose in the East German political and media hierarchies, his role during his time in the Nazi concentration camp system was often exaggerated retrospectively. For the fifteenth edition of his "autobiography" a ghost writer presented a scene that involved Axen, armed with a machine pistol, storming an SS watch-tower: this is believed to be fiction. Manfred Uschner worked closely with Axen during the 1960s and 1970s, and described Axen the concentration camp inmate as "very cool and reserved". "In the concentration camp, as a relatively young comrade, he played no significant role, or at least not a strikingly positive one".
Auschwitz concentration camp was emptied of its internees, as the Red army advanced from the east, in January 1945 and Axen was among the survivors transferred to Buchenwald near Weimar. Sources assert that he was a member of the illegal Communist Party leadership team in the concentration camp. As the war neared its end, in April 1945 it was US troops that liberated Axen from the Buchenwald camp.
Soviet occupation zone
Although the region of central southern Germany that included both Buchenwald and Axen's home city of Leipzig was liberated by US forces, the victorious allies had already agreed a postwar territorial division of Germany whereby the entire central portion of the country would be administered as the Soviet occupation zone. The Americans pulled their troops back to the agreed lines on their maps in July 1945, and by August 1945 Axen had been installed as Head of the Youth Committee with the appointed city council of Soviet-administered Leipzig and as a member of the regional leadership team ("Kreisleitung") of the local Communist Party. Between October 1945 and February 1946 he was Head of the Youth Committee for the entire Saxony region. In April 1946 he was one of thousands of Communist Party members who lost no in signing their party membership over to the newly formed Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED). The SED was formed through a contentious merger of the Communist Party and the less Moscow oriented Social Democratic Party. Its promoters may have hoped that the merger would take effect across Germany, but in the event it was only possible obtain the support necessary for it to take effect in the Soviet occupation zone, where the SED quickly emerged as the permanent ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. For Axen 1946 was also the year in which he co-founded the "Anti-Fascist youth committee" ("antifaschistische Jugendausschuß"). Of greater long-term importance was his role as co-founder, together with Paul Verner und Erich Honecker of the Free German Youth ("Freie Deutsche Jugend" / FDJ), which very quickly became, in effect, the youth wing of the ruling SED. Between March 1946 and February 1949 he served as secretary to the FDJ National Council ("Zentralrat").