Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Selbmann (29 September 1899 – 26 January 1975) was a German Communist politician and writer who served as a member of the national parliament (Reichstag) during 1932/33.

[8] The next year military defeat quickly degenerated into a series of revolutionary uprisings in German ports and cities, which also spread to army units.

He was back in Moscow during 1928/29 when he attended a course of study at the Communist International's "Lenin Academy" (where he was identified by a party pseudonym as "Skowronek").

Between 1930 and 1932 he served as a member of the Prussian parliament ("Landtag") itself, taking over a seat vacated through the death in October 1930 of a party comrade.

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.

[13] Selbmann, meanwhile, was held in investigatory custody in Leipzig and Berlin for approximately two and a half years,[6] 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" (... wegen "Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").

[14] 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.

[14] The move was implemented on the orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself: it represented a punishment "for building [Communist] cells in the camp [at Sachsenhausen], organizing revolutionary work, and privileging political prisoners".

[14] 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.

[8] 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 Leipzig, Fritz Selbmann immediately took on the leadership of the "Provisional Central Committee of the Antifascist Bloc" ("Provisorischen Zentralausschusses des Antifaschistischen Blocks").

[8] 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 ("... beim Aufbau des Sozialismus bedeutende Verdienste erwarben").

[7] The establishment of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in October 1949 saw the administrative structures in the Soviet occupation zone replaced.

[6] In 1949 he was also selected for membership of the People's Council ("Volksrat"), a body mandated to draw up a constitution based on a draft document helpfully provided by the SED.

1953 was also the year of the East German uprising, and on the afternoon of 16 June 1953 Fritz Selbmann, considered to be more "approachable" than some of his stony-faced leadership comrades, stood in front of the vast Ministries Building in the Leipziger Straße to undertake discussions with protesters.

[15] Selbmann invited his listeners to look at his rough hands, which showed that he was a worker himself ("Seht euch meine Hände an", ruft er der Menge zu, "ich bin selber Arbeiter.

The country's constitutional structure had been imported from the Soviet Union after 1945, and under the centralised Leninist system power lay not with government ministries and certainly not with any parliament.

)[7] At the party conference in February 1958 he was accused by Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker of "managerialism" ("Managertums") and a "deviant attitude" ("abweichender Haltung").

[6] Along with a number of novels, which enjoyed modest success on the domestic market in their day, there was an autobiography, "Acht Jahre und ein Tag.

[4] That may be why this book remained unpublished in Selbmann's lifetime, only appearing in 1999, nearly ten years after the social, economic and then political changes that put an end to the stand-alone German Democratic Republic.

Other educational institutions and public structures were named in his honour including the vast Black Pump "Fritz Selbmann" Gas Complex.

[6] He was also a recipient, in 1960, of the Banner of Labor[7] and in 1969 of the Order of Karl Marx[6] and, in recognition of his contribution to literature, of the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic, Class II.