Otto Gotsche

Otto Gotsche (3 July 1904 – 17 December 1985) was a German political activist (KPD) and writer.

Gotsche's father was a miner, and between 1918 and 1921 the boy trained as a metal worker.

By this time he had already co-founded, in 1918, the Mansfeld regional Free Socialist Youth movement and joined in the revolutionary turmoil that broke out across Germany in the aftermath of national military defeat.

Aged just 15, he joined the newly launched Communist Party in 1919.

In 1920 he was working as a labour correspondent for the Communist press, also involving himself in opposition to the abortive Kapp Putsch.

Nevertheless, for most of the 1920s he was able to obtain employment, using his metal working knowledge, with factories in the Merseburg and Wasserkante areas, which he was able to combine with his work for the Communist Party and its youth wing.

In 1921 Gotsche was sentenced to a jail term because of his involvement in the so-called March Action.

He received another jail term in 1923 when his functions as a Communist party official - which according to one source involved participation in an armed uprising in the Autumn of that year - landed him with a conviction for high treason.

A period of unemployment followed his release from prison.

He undertook an extended working tour of northern Germany in 1924 and also found time to visit the Soviet Union in 1927.

Moving to the Hamburg area, in 1932/33 Gotsche served as a city councillor in Harburg-Wilhelmsburg, while continuing to pursue his work as a party official.

The Nazis took power in January 1933 and lost little time in converting the German state into a one-party dictatorship.

Political activity (unless in support of the Nazi party) became illegal.

Gotsche was arrested in March 1933 and spent several months in Sonnenburg concentration camp.

Following his release he was kept under close police surveillance.

After 1934 he continued to use his metal working skills on various building sites in the Halle-Merseburg area which enabled him unobtrusively to sustain connections with other communists.

After 1939 Gotsche built up a resistance group, centred on the Geisel valley district.

Between 1941 and 1945 he worked in the Lützkendorf fuel factory of Wintershall AG.

In 1942 the group merged with the similarly illegal Communist Party orgsanisation headed up by in Eisleben, to form the Central German Antifascist Working Group (Antifaschistischiste Arbeitsgruppe Mitteldeutschlands / AAM) which they led, together with Kläre and Adolf Jahns-Taskiwski.

Along with its connections in the Mansfeld region, the AAM had individual contacts in Halle, Zeitz, Querfurt, Weißenfels, Erfurt, Gotha and several towns in the Rhine-Ruhr region.

In the closing years of the war it was one of the largest and best regional opposition groups in the entire country.

It avoided close relationships on a group level with other Communist opposition groups, as a result of which it also successfully avoided being penetrated by Gestapo spies.

After 1945 he moved into mainstream politics.

During the Nazi years he worked effectively in the country's resistance movement.

Having survived, he became a leading member of the East German literary establishment.

In March 1945, with foreign armies fighting their way towards Berlin and the end of the war in sight the AAM organised armed resistance groups, and at the start of April set up an illegal "citizens' committee" incorporating former Red Front and Reichsbanner members to form the leadership of a citizen militia.

On 13 April 1945, shortly before the arrival of the US army, they disarmed the local police and took over the Eisleben town hall.

When the Americans did arrive they installed Gotsche as district administrator (Landrat) for the two contiguous Mansfeld districts.

However, before they departed they removed him again because of his "Communist activities".

Although central southern Germany was liberated from the Nazis by the US army, many of the postwar national frontiers of Europe had by that time already been agreed, albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm, by the leaders of the victorious nations.

Most of the eastern part of Germany was passed to Poland and the eastern part of Poland was passed to the Soviet Union.

What was left of Germany was to be divided into four allied occupation zones, and what had been the central portion of Germany was to be administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

Respecting the agreement between President Roosevelt and General Secretary Stalin, in July 1945 the US army removed itself from the region and the Soviets moved in.

Otto Gotsche was promptly installed as vice president of the regional administration to be based in Merseburg, with special responsibility for implementing land reform.

Less than a year later, on 27 March 1946,, the president of the Merseberg regional administration died, and Gotsche replaced him.

A committed adherent to the country's political path during the 1950s and 1960s, he enjoyed the confidence of Walter Ulbricht, at times employed as an official spokesman for the leader.

In 1966 he became a member of the country's powerful Party Central Committee.

After Ulbricht lost power in 1971, the public profile of Otto Gotsche quickly faded, and he found himself retiring, one by one, from the various party offices he had acquired.

He continued to be officially honoured for his work as a writer till the end, however.

Otto Gotsche was born in Wolferode, a quarter on the western side of Eisleben, a small town to the west of Leipzig which then, as now, was chiefly venerated as the birthplace of Martin Luther.