History of Stalinism – The Forgotten Life Story of the Martha Naujoks

On June 12, 1937, the “International Control Commission” (IKK) and the party leadership will have the decision to “Inge Karst” as a non -trusting element “ to exclude from the party. During this time there are also considerations to send them from the Soviet Union to another area of application. These plans are apparently dropped again. The self -exclusion is notified without further explanation and only on July 29, another six weeks later. It is one of around 900 Germans who were excluded from the KPD between autumn 1936 and early 1938.

The exclusion, which can be assumed, hits Inge Karst like a blow. Distance from the party and thus the movement of the proletariat after 17 years of highly active, intensive and risky activity! Just three days after she found out about the exclusion, she turns to Wilhelm Pieck in a handwritten letter and asks for a conversation “because I am in a situation where I still don’t know”: “It is not just about saving my party honor, but also about clarifying the occurrences in Hamburg to serve the whole thing and not only create clarity for me, but also for the party.”

The following day, Karst rises “with a detailed letter” at the IKK and “the comrade Dimitroff and Pieck” Objection to the decision to which she does not receive an answer. In the following months, she takes elaborate steps to convince the party that its exclusion was wrong.

As much as the allegations are directed here, other parts of their correspondence with the party responsible also speak a surprisingly confident language. As early as August 1937, she criticized it clearly: »No comrade of the German Party here in Moscow spoke to me in the interest of the investigation. This is also simply intolerable for me personally. ”She also demands – at a moment when“ Lux «is constantly arrested in her accommodation and in the opposite hotel, including friends and acquaintances – her right in awareness that the party was wrong in her case. In January 1938 she wrote another of her many letters in which she asks the IKK and the German party leadership to re -examine her case.

In it, she appreciates aggressively employees of the IKK of having checked the documents of her case “not sufficiently thorough (…) and also not objectively (…)”. Although she made the mistake of not specifying her mother’s membership in the Leninbund. However, she himself never belonged to a group or faction against the party. Her release in October 1933 was also not suspicious, since the mandate bearers Elise Augustat and Alice Wosikowski were released with her. She closes again in a confident tone of a revolutionary who wrongly done the comrades. In doing so, she sets cleverly (or desperately?) Stalin as a guarantor for her request, and in words whose clarity is shocking:

“I very much regret that I do not have a copy of the exclusion justification in my hands and therefore cannot respond to other points given in the same. Enjoyed! I have been in the party since I was 17. My whole development, all of my conscious life was in active work for the party in the continued political struggle. In my illegal work in 1921 in Halle, 1923, 1933 to 1935 in Hamburg, I have proven that I am ready to use everything for the party. The judgment was made in half an hour about this 17 -year party activity. You understand comrades who have been experiencing a painful months since then is’ for the one-time party members that remaining in the party or the exclusion from the party is a question of life and death (Stalin). “

“No comrade of the German Party here in Moscow spoke to me in the interest of the investigation.”

Martha Naujoks, 1937

“To use the last” in a “question of life and death” – in response to this dramatic, existential request, she only receives the decision that you can get more information.

The determination – also in criticism of party bureaucracy! – And the effort, which becomes clear in these lines, are all the more remarkable than they are in an unsafe, increasingly deteriorating situation during these months. To be independent, and even worse: former comrade, also enormously endanger her social situation. Because the termination of your job is accompanied by the RedizdAT, which means that your livelihood and your accommodation are at risk.

At the same time, the impacts are getting closer. On November 24, 1937, she informed the German party leadership of its “uncertainty and accordingly material needs” and lets them know desperately: “I’m currently at the end of my strength”. Just two days later, her Moscow girlfriend Roberta Gropper becomes a member of an allegedly “anti -sowing group” Arrested for the former ZK member Heinz Neumann. It is not possible to say whether the arrest with her is more of a horror whether the successful camouflage of the counter -revolutionary friend or whether the extent of the repression triggers.

In any case, she sees the need to remove any suspicion of the proximity to the arrested and clarifies the KPD representative in the Komintern on his own possession of Gropper’s whipping machine. Even a gifted typewriter, but at this time an important political and professional tools, was able to transfer the part of the party to its new owner. So that’s not enough. Four months later, in April 1938, Käthe Schulz was arrested, who, like Inge Karst, lives in the “Soyusnaja” hotel, even proudly with her and Ruth in the same room. If the three comrades are all at home at this moment, hear the knocking and wonder who the “Comrade from the NKWD” for came?

Although the arrests come close to her these days, she still clearly speaks of her exclusion from the party as “injustice”. It is not only her situation “morally unbearable”, but also by the following discharge from the comintricial position also “questioned her material existence”. From her room No. 90 in the hotel “Soyusnaja” she stated in early April 1938: “I think you can enjoy the right to be able to use the morally oppressive state and that in my situation, full clarity will be created quickly.”

At that time, the third of the show processes in the city of her exile has just been completed; In March 1938, Nikolai Bucharin and other old Bolsheviks were accused of having formed and convicted and shot shortly afterwards.

Perhaps it is simply lucky that your name was not based on the commands of the NKVD officials, but that of her friend Roberta Gropper and her roommate Käthe Schulz. Perhaps the trust is crucial that one of the leading comrades of the young party worker brings. At this point there is darkness again. However, it is likely that it is favorable in your case that the two people who had been excluded-Władysław Stein-Kraevsky and Grete Wilde-had fallen victim to the Stalinist terror itself for about a year. Stein-Krajewski was caught in May 1937, shot in September; Grete Wilde, arrested in October 1937, probably died in 1943 in a camp of the Gulag system.