Fritz Selbmann
Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Selbmann was a German Communist politician and writer who served as a member of the national parliament during 1932/33.
He spent the twelve Nazi years first in prison and then, after 1940, in a succession of concentration camps, but survived. After 1945 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 Woodworkers' Union. 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' soviet for his battery. He then joined the workers' and soldiers' soviet in Naumburg and was a member till early in 1920 of "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. 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 in the "Alliance of Red Front-Fighters" in the Ruhr region and a member of the German national leadership with the RFB and of the regional party leadership team 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". He returned as the party's Trades Union Secretary within the Team Leadership 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 parliaments. 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 member of the Prussian parliament 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" with the regional party leadership team 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 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. 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". 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 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 "illegal" Sporthaus Ziegenhals meeting, celebrated subsequently 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 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". He was sentenced to a seven-year jail term. He was held till May 1940 at the Waldheim penitentiary 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 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 cells in the camp , 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. In Leipzig, Fritz Selbmann immediately took on the leadership of the "Provisional Central Committee of the Antifascist Bloc". 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. Another office to which the military authorities appointed him in 1945 was as First Secretary of the Communist Party District Leadership for Leipzig. In August 1945 he was appointed president of the Regional Labour Office 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 member of the regional parliament, resigning 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.In April 1946 the new Socialist Unity Party was successfully launched by means of a contentious political merger which was intended, it was explained, 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. It was an irony not lost on western commentators that over the next few years the SED itself became the ruling party in a new kind of one-party German state. 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. He was a member of the political leadership class: a return to national politics beckoned. In 1948, after stepping down from his regional ministerial position in Saxony, Selbmann moved to Berlin. He was appointed deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission, which can be described as "the top administrative body" in the Soviet occupation zone. He also enjoyed responsibility during 1948/49 for the "National Industrial Department". The establishment of the German Democratic Republic in October 1949 saw the administrative structures in the Soviet occupation zone replaced. Ministers replaced administrators and Vasily Chuikov, till 1949 head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, became instead head of the People's Control Commission. In some ways the structural changes accompanying the launch of East Germany were more apparent than real. Selbmann was one of several senior administrators who became a government minister.