Paul Schäfer (1894-1938) was an early member of the KPD in Erfurt. After participating in the resistance against the Kapp Putsch of 1920, he became involved in municipal politics for the KPD. When he was fired from his job in a shoe factory, he became a full-timer for the movement.
Forced into exile after the Nazis came to power, Schäfer first went to France and then to the Soviet-Union. In the post-war German Democratic Republic, he was remembered as a working-class Communist and as a fighter against fascism who was killed in combat during the Spanish Civil War. An army unit was named after him, as was a shoe factory. A commemorative plaque on the wall of the house where he lived declared he ‘gave his life in the struggle against fascism’.
After the collapse of the GDR, however, documents became available showing that Schäfer never made it to Spain. He was, like many other Communist exiles in the Soviet Union, killed during the ‘purges’. Schäfer was executed at the Butovo killing site, a former farm near Moscow where some 20,000 people were killed.
Schäfer was not associated with any opposition current. After joining the KPD, he had followed every shift made by the leadership. But being linientreu did not save him from persecution.
For German Communists in the nineteen-thirties, few places were more dangerous than the Soviet-Union. Exact figures are lacking, but Paul Jäkel, responsible for the German section of the Comintern, estimated in 1938 that over 70 per cent of KPD members in the Soviet Union had been arrested.[1] Of the 68 top officials in the KPD based in the Soviet-Union, 41 were murdered.[2] In 1991, the Institute for History of the Workers’ Movement, the successor to the GDR’s Institute for Marxism-Leninism published a compilation of 1,136 capsule biographies of activists from the German workers’ movement who fell victim to the Stalinist terror.[3] Since then, researchers have identified 1,019 Germans, mostly party-members or sympathisers who were executed or perished in the camps.[4] As the prominent historian of German Communism Hermann Weber pointed out, of the 1933 leadership of the KPD, more were killed in Stalinism than in Nazi Germany.[5]
Many more Germans and people with a German background in the Soviet Union were swept up in the ‘German operation’ of the NKVD. This was one of several ‘national operations’ in which Soviet authorities targeted groups based on ethnic criteria. The German operation was initiated with a July 1937 hand-written notice from Stalin himself; ‘All Germans in our arms industry, partially military and chemical factories, in electrical power stations and on construction sites EVERYWHERE are to be ARRESTED’.[6] In a familiar pattern, the repression then escalated to ever wider circles.
Targets were not only people with German citizenship but also people with Soviet citizenship such as political exiles whose German citizenship had been revoked by the Nazis and citizens of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. As Russian historians Nikita Ochotin and Arseni Roginski wrote, the peculiarity of such operations ‘was precisely that the basis of the repression was not any actions (real or fabricated), not “compromising material”, but the belonging to a certain category of people’.[7] In the framework of the German operation following ‘order nr. 00485’, 41,989 people were executed.[8]
Even if Schäfer had escaped the German operation, his association with Willi Münzenberg made him a marked man. Schäfer had worked for the Internationalen Arbeiterhilfe or Workers International Relief, on organisation set up by Münzenberg. The IAH’s original aim was to channel aid from workers’ organisations to the Soviet Union. A few years later, the ‘Münzenberg-complex’ would play an important role in producing Soviet propaganda. As secretary for the organisation, Schäfer worked together with Münzenberg who also stayed at his house several times. But, in the late thirties, after Schäfer’s move to the Soviet Union, Münzenberg began to increasingly doubt the Stalinist leadership. In March 1938, the Comintern broke its contact with Münzenberg and, in April 1939, he was expelled from the KPD. After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Münzenberg denounced Stalin as a traitor.[9] In October 1940, Münzenberg’s body was discovered in a forest near the French village of Montagne. The circumstances of his death have never been clarified.
Even before the formal break with Münzenberg, the Soviet police was targeting his co-workers. Already in late 1936, future GDR-leader Walter Ulbricht wrote in 1938, it was decided to ‘liquidate’ Münzenberg’s international network, as it was supposedly used for the infiltration of enemy ‘agents’.[10] The interrogation protocols show that Schäfer initially denied any involvement with espionage or sabotage. But, after a few days, Schäfer suddenly ‘confessed’ to having been recruited by Nazi intelligence services in Paris in 1935, supposedly through Münzenberg’s secretary. Torture and blackmail of prisoners was common, so it is no surprise that Schäfer ‘admitted’ the truth of this incredibly story. A year after his death, Soviet authorities concluded that Schäfer had been in no position to gather information.
A small number of the German Communists who fell victim to Stalinism were rehabilitated in the German Democratic Republic. The most prominent of those was Hugo Eberlein, a founding member of the KPD who was executed in 1941, also at Butovo. Eberlein was rehabilitated in 1956. In general, however, the GDR leadership preferred to keep silent about the persecution of their comrades by Stalin’s police.
The myth about Schäfer however was not invented by GDR authorities. It was invented by a friend to help Schäfer’s widow, who had been left behind in Erfurt, access a pension for family members of victims of fascism.
High-level GDR leaders such as Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht knew the truth about Schäfer’s death: they had signed off on his expulsion from the KPD, a preliminary step before his execution. GDR historians added to the myth, making unsubstantiated claims about Schäfer playing a prominent role in the local workers’ council in 1919 and as a leading figure in the struggle against the Kapp Putsch. The myth that this working-class veteran party-member had died fighting Franco’s fascists was more useful than the truth that he had been a victim of Stalinism.
The truth about Schäfer’s death came to light as after the collapse of the GDR archives of the ruling SED party became public. Further research in Russian archives confirmed Schäfer was killed on 26 July 1938.[11] Rumours about mass graves around Butovo were confirmed in 1993 as former officials broke their silence. In 2017, a memorial was placed at the site with the names of the people killed there, among them Paul Schäfer. The memorial plaque on Schäfer’s old home is still there, now with an added frame explaining he was killed during Stalinism.
[1] Andreas Petersen, ‘Die Gründergeneration der DDR. Lebengeschichtliche Prägung und herrschaftpolitisches Handeln der Sowjetunionrückkehrer’, Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2023, pp. 11-24, p. 12.
[2] Petersen, ‘Die Gründergeneration der DDR’, p. 13.
[3] Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, In den Fängen des NKWD: Deutsche Opfer des stalinistischen Terrors in der UdSSR, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991. The capsule biography of Schäfer is on page 197.
[4] Petersen, ‘Die Gründergeneration der DDR’, p. 12.
[5] Hermann Weber, ‘Weiße Flecken’ in der Geschichte. Die KPD-Opfer der Stalinschen Säuberungen und ihre Rehabilitierung, Frankfurt am Main: ISP-Verlag, 1989, p. 19.
[6] Nikita Ochotin, Arseni Roginski, ‘Zur Geschichte der “Deutschen Operation” des NKWD 1937–1938’, Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2000/2001, Berlin 2001, pp. 89–125, p. 89.
[7] Ochotin, Roginski, ‘Zur Geschichte der “Deutschen Operation” des NKWD 1937–1938, p. 103.
[8] Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011, p. 637.
[9] This the concluding line of Münzenberg’s 22. September 1939 article ‘Der russische Dolchstoss’, online: muenzenbergforum.de/exponat/der-russische-dolchstoss.
[10] Annegret Schüle, Stefan Weise, Thomas Schäfer, Paul Schäfer. Erfurter Kommunist, ermordert im Stalinismus, Erfurt: Landeszentrale politische Bildung Thüringen, 2019, p. 110.
[11] Schüle, Weise, Schäfer, Paul Schäfer, p. 118.
