Arthur Lieberasch (2 November 1881 – 10 June 1967) was a Communist trades union official who became a member of the Parliament of Saxony ("Sächsischer Landtag") and, after 1933 an anti-government resistance activist.
[2] During 1917 Lieberasch was among the leaders of the strikes that broke out in Leipzig - initially mostly in the munitions factories - in response to the food shortages which had intensified during the so-called "turnip winter" of 1917 and in the aftermath an announcement by the authorities (accompanied by government statements trumpeting the success of submarine warfare), on 15 April 1917, of a cut in the weekly bread ration from 1,350g to 450g.
However, the revolutionary outbursts in the German ports and cities directly after the war left the authorities with more urgent priorities, and his case never went to trial.
[2] Both the revolutionaries and the volunteer militias (Freikorps) of former soldiers who resisted them saw the Russian Revolution as a possible template for a post-imperial Germany.
[2] As a member of the regional party leadership team ("KPD-Bezirksleitung") for western Saxony, Arthur Lieberasch was Secretary for Trades Union questions.
[2] By this time he was seen as part of the right win within the Communist Party which, during the 1920s, was falling increasingly into the hands of a younger generation of left-wingers.
Within the Saxony party leadership his traditional trades union principals were not naturally compatible with the thesis of "social fascism" propounded by the hard-line doctrinaire Stalinists such as Rudolf Renner and Walter Ulbricht who were becoming increasingly powerful.
Non-Nazis with any sort of record of political activism, especially if it involved the Communist Party or the trades union movement, were at particular risk from the authorities.
Following an instruction from the party leadership, Arthur Liberasch crossed the frontier into Switzerland and settled in Schaffhausen, then as now on the edge of a small Swiss enclave surrounded on three sides, for reasons of topography, by German territory.
Walter Ulbricht, with whom he had clashed in the 1920s when they were both members of the Leipzig Communist Party, was by now the most powerful German in the Soviet occupation zone, as was a man with a famously long memory.
Invited to write a statement of self-criticism, as was the normal Stalinist custom under such circumstances in East Germany, Arthur Lieberasch confined himself to a single sentence, from which the expected expressions of deep remorse were conspicuously absent: "Creating the KPO was not a mistake, but simply an offence against [party] discipline" ("Die Bildung der KPO war kein Fehler, sondern nur ein Verstoß gegen die Disziplin").
This long standing 'professional enemy of the party' recently wrote a statement to the party about Brandler as follows, in what amounted to a moral justification of Brandler, 'Brandler was just another poor swine like me, and like me had nothing to wear', and so on" ("Dieser Lieberasch hat heute nicht nur seine Agenten in der Partei, sondern ist selbst Mitglied unserer SED im Kreis Leipzig.
Dieser alte professionelle Parteifeind schrieb vor kurzem in einer Erklärung an die Partei über Brandler folgendes, was einer moralischen Rechtfertigung Brandlers gleichkommt: 'Brandler war genau so ein armes Schwein wie ich und hatte auch nichts anzuziehen', und so fort").
[2] By 1957, taking its queue somewhat belatedly from Comrade Khrushchev, the East German government implemented a cautious amount of De-Stalinization during the course of which Arthur Lieberasch was readmitted to the party.