Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Selbmann (29 September 1899 – 26 January 1975) was a German communist politician and writer who served in several legislative positions in the Weimar Republic and East Germany between 1932 and 1963. In the latter state, he also served as Minister of Industry and Heavy Industry from 1949 to 1955, and as Deputy Minister-President of the Council of Ministers from 1955 to 1958.
A manual laborer and veteran of World War I, Selbmann became a regional leader of the Communist Party during the Weimar era. He spent the twelve years of Nazi rule in prison and, after 1940, in a series of concentration camps, though he survived. After the war's end he became a senior party official and author in the German Democratic Republic.
Biography Provenance and early years Selbmann was born at Lauterbach a small town in the hills to the northeast of Frankfurt. His father worked as a coppersmith. He attended school locally and then in 1915 relocated to work as a miner near Bochum. He also undertook factory work during this period and, in 1916, became a member of the . In 1917 he became a soldier in the First World War, serving in France and Belgium. The next year military defeat quickly degenerated into a series of revolutionary uprisings in German ports and cities, which also spread to army units. In 1918 Selbmann was a member of the soldiers' council for his battery. He then joined the workers' and soldiers' council in Naumburg and was a member until early in 1920 when it was broken up by "Grenzschutz West", one of a number of paramilitary "Black Reichswehr" units made up of former soldiers of the German Empire.
Politics In 1920 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany: he then joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1922. Between 1920 and 1924 he undertook a succession of jobs in various places, at one stage working as a miner at Hindenburg in Oberschlesien (as Zabrze had been renamed in 1915). In 1922/23 he was actively involved in opposition to French occupation of the Ruhr region. In 1923 the French authorities took him into "protective custody".
In 1924 Selbmann became organisation leader for the local Communist Party branch in Bottrop. Between 1925 and 1928 he was a local party leader ("Gauführer") in the "Alliance of Red Front-Fighters" ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / RFB) in the Ruhr region and a member of the German national leadership with the RFB and of the regional party leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for the Ruhr. He was back in Moscow during 1928/29 when he attended a course of study at the Communist International's "Lenin Academy" (where he was identified by a party pseudonym as "Skowronek"). He returned as the party's Trades Union Secretary within the Team Leadership ("Bezirklsleitung") for the economically crucial Ruhr region. During 1929/30 he also worked as editor in chief of the "Ruhrecho", a newspaper based in Essen.
Within Germany by far the largest state was Prussia, which unlike the other German states still had a large number of . Provincial parliamentary elections were held on 17 November 1929 and in the heavily industrialised Prussian Rhine Province the Communists won a 12.7% vote share, entitling them to 21 seats in the 163 seat parliament. One of the Communist Party seats went to Fritz Selbmann. Between 1930 and 1932 he served as a of the Prussian parliament ("Landtag") itself, taking over a seat vacated through the death in October 1930 of a party comrade.
Crisis years He combined his membership of the Prussian parliament with other party functions, serving as "Polleiter" (literally, "policy leader") with the regional party leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") in Upper Silesia from May 1930. That role ended early in 1931 when he took on the same function with the "Bezirksleitung" for Saxony which was the party's second largest regional branch, exceeded in importance only by the Greater Berlin region. Meanwhile, national politics were becoming ever more polarised and the national parliament (Reichstag) becoming ever more deadlocked, 1932 was a year of two general elections. The first of these took place in July 1932, and the Communist Party share of the vote increased to more than 14%, equating to 89 seats in a 608-seat parliament. One of those seats went to Fritz Selbmann. He was elected not simply as a "list candidate", but as a representative of electoral district 29 (Leipzig).
During this period the focus of Selbmann's political energies was on "united action by the working class and the triggering of mass struggle against the dangers of fascism" ("für die Aktionseinheit der Arbeiterklasse und die Entfaltung des Massenkampfes gegen die faschistische Gefahr"). The Communist Party vote share increased further in the November 1932 election and Selbmann retained his Leipzig seat. By contrast, the National Socialist share of the national vote fell back in that election, even though they remained the largest single party in what was by now an extremely fragmented Reichstag. With the parliamentary process still completely deadlocked and increasingly discredited the National Socialists took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. That made political activity (except in support of Nazi policy) illegal, and the authorities quickly became particularly zealous in attending to those with a political past or present that involved the Communist Party. On 7 February 1933 Selbmann was one of the participants at the , celebrated subsequently (especially during the "East German" years) as the last meeting held by the German Communist Party leadership before the participants were arrested and killed, or in some cases managed to escape abroad.
The focus of Selbmann's (by definition illegal) political work switched to Leipzig which is where, on 11 April 1933, he was arrested. It was around this time that his wife died. Their six-year-old son , who later became a successful author, would grow up with family friends. Selbmann, meanwhile, was held in investigatory custody in Leipzig and Berlin for approximately two and a half years, and then tried at the special People's Court early in November 1935, facing the usual charge under such circumstances of "preparing to commit high treason" (... wegen "Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"). He was sentenced to a seven-year jail term. He was held till May 1940 at the where some or all of his sentence was served in solitary confinement.
The sentence having taken account of the time spent in pretrial detention, he was scheduled for release in 1940, but instead he was taken into "protective custody", and spent the next two years as an inmate at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. At Sachsenhausen there was already a core of communist activists among the inmates who were able (discretely) to welcome another political soulmate. Across Germany, as war deaths took their toll of manpower, administration of daily life in concentration camps was increasingly delegated by the camp guards to trusted inmates; the decisions of "friends" meant that Selbmann was set to work in the vehicle repair shop of the camp brick making operation where, as he later recalled, the work was "not hard or especially dangerous". In November 1942, however, he was moved to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, which supplied labour to local quarries, set in mountains adjacent to the border with what was at that time known as the Sudetenland. According to Selbmann's own recollection the transfer to Flossenbürg involved eighteen prisoners who had been placed in solitary confinement the previous month as a response to their political activities. The move was implemented on the orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself: it represented a punishment "for building [Communist] cells in the camp [at Sachsenhausen], organizing revolutionary work, and privileging political prisoners". During what turned out to be the final weeks of the war the Flossenbürg camp was closed down and Selbmann was transferred again, this time to Dachau in the suburbs north of Munich. At the end of April 1945, as the authorities raced to clear the concentration camps of their inmates ahead of the arrival of the invading armies, he was sent out on one of the infamous death marches. He managed to escape and made his way back to Leipzig.
Soviet occupation zone
Leipzig had been liberated from Nazi control by United States forces in April 1945, but by that time a different postwar division of Germany had been agreed between the victorious leaders. In July 1945 the Americans pulled back to be replaced by Soviet forces. The central third of what had been Germany was now administered as the Soviet occupation zone, to be relaunched, in October 1949, as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In Leipzig, Fritz Selbmann immediately took on the leadership of the "Provisional Central Committee of the Antifascist Bloc" ("Provisorischen Zentralausschusses des Antifaschistischen Blocks"). It is not entirely clear what this involved, but it was in any case only one of several leadership roles within the political structure that came his way, as he joined with like-minded comrades, in the upbeat language of those times, to overcome the destruction of war, develop a national economy and build a socialist future ("... beim Aufbau des Sozialismus bedeutende Verdienste erwarben"). Another office to which the military authorities appointed him in 1945 was as First Secretary of the Communist Party District Leadership ("Kreisleitung") for Leipzig. In August 1945 he was appointed president of the Regional Labour Office ("... des Landesarbeitsamtes") and in September 1945 he was made Regional Vice-president for State Administration in Saxony. In October 1946, as seemingly more long-term political institutions emerged, he was elected a of the , resigning (as his national political responsibilities increased) only on 30 June 1950. Additionally, in December 1946 he was appointed Economics and Planning Minister in the State of Saxony, a position he retained till 1948. This was part of a tier of government that would formally cease to exist by the end of 1952, as an of political power took hold.
In April 1946 the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) was successfully launched (if only in Germany's Soviet zone) by means of a contentious political merger which was intended to ensure that political divisions on the left would never again leave the way open for the election to power of a populist right wing political party. During 1946 Fritz Selbmann was one of thousands of Communist Party members who lost no time in signing their party memberships across to the new party. In 1948, after stepping down from his regional ministerial position in Saxony, Selbmann moved to (East) Berlin. He was appointed deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission, a "the top administrative body" in the Soviet occupation zone, and also enjoyed responsibility during 1948/49 for the "National Industrial Department" ("Hauptverwaltung Industrie"). The establishment of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in October 1949 saw the administrative structures in the Soviet occupation zone replaced. Ministers replaced administrators and Vasily Chuikov, until 1949 head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, became instead head of the People's Control Commission. Selbmann was one of several senior administrators who became a government minister.
German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
In the new government Selbmann was appointed Minister for Industry in 1949, and then, as the department was very soon subdivided, Minister for Heavy Industry in 1950. Between 1951 and 1953 he served as Minister for Ores Mining and Metallurgy.