Walter Trautzsch (16 March 1903 – 23 September 1971) was a German political activist who engaged as an anti-fascist resistance fighter during the Hitler years.
[3]) Walter Ehrengott Trautzsch was born in Lengefeld, a small industrial town in the mining region south of Chemnitz, and close to the frontier with Bohemia.
[4] On leaving school, Walter Trautzch successfully completed an apprenticeship in industrial metal forming (als "Metalldrücker"), which was the trade from which he would earn his living, working in various German towns and cities, till 1929.
[4] That year Trautzsch also visited the Soviet Union as a member of the delegation from "Universum-Bücherei", a short-lived and by this time overtly left-leaning book publishing and dealing organisation.
The Reichstag fire was followed by a savage clamp down on known members of the (by now illegal) Communist: Walter Trautzsch was arrested by Nazi paramilitaries on 3 March 1933 and taken into "protective custody", becoming one of the first inmates at Colditz Castle, following its conversion into a political prison.
[2][4] The leading party figure in Prague was Walter Ulbricht, an exceptionally ambitious comrade who would emerge in 1949 as the political leader of the freshly launched German Democratic Republic.
Between August 1936 and February 1939 he undertook at least eighteen courier missions at intervals of between four and six weeks, in order to meet up with Rosa Thälmann, the party leader's wife who lived in Hamburg.
One source refers to "Edwin" providing dictated reports which were written down by Hermann Nuding, by this time based in Paris, who then took care to pass the completed transcripts to Moscow.
With Ulbricht out of the way it increasingly fell to Franz Dahlem, Anton Ackermann, Hermann Nuding and Paul Bertz to manage the party's "Thälmann courier".
During the Autumn/Fall of 1938 they even arranged an eight-day holiday for him at the little port town and beach resort of Saint-Malo, in company with the recently returned veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Walter Beling.
It appears that the would-be double agent was not trusted by the Communist leadership in Paris, and there is no surviving evidence of his having undertaken courier work on behalf of the German authorities.
[4] Following the outbreak of war, like many German political and/or racially disadvantaged refugees from Nazism who had thought they had found refuge in Paris and London, Walter Trautzsch was identified as an enemy alien and interned in a series of holding camps in southwest France.
He evidently acquired effective false identity documents from somewhere, and after a brief and apparently unsatisfactory hotel meeting with Anton Ackermann, who seems to have escaped internment and to have been living "underground", still in France, at this point, Trautzsch succeeded in crossing the border first into Belgium and then, using some characteristically circuitous (and "adventurous"[2]) route, into Switzerland where, using another false identity, he was able to present himself to the authorities as "Kurt Schneider" a Czechoslovak refugee.
[5]) During this time he teamed up with other communist political exiles from Germany who had managed to find their way to Switzerland including, notably, Maria Weiterer, Leo Bauer and Fritz Sperling.
[1] During 1945, with Nazism defeated, the central third of what had been Germany - including Trautzsch's home region in south-western Saxony - ended up under Soviet Military Administration.
There was therefore an inescapable irony in the fact that in 1954 Trautzsch himself fell foul of the institutional paranoia, displayed with a new intensity by the national leadership in the aftermath of the (brutally but effectively crushed) uprising in June 1953.
Someone checked out some old files and found evidence of obligations to work for the Gestapo, to which (the "Central Party Control Commission" ("Zentrale Parteikontrollkommission" / ZPKK) determined) Trautzsch had agreed, following his arrest on a train near Aachen back in February 1939.
Dahlem was no longer the powerful figure he had been in the early 1950s, but his insistence that Trautzsch, who was by now a lonely and increasingly embittered comrade, deserved to be recognized and honoured for the services he had provided to the party and its leaders during the 1930s.
When Walter Treutzsch died in Leipzig on 23 September 1971, the party saw to it that a brief obituary notice appeared in the mass circulation newspaper Neues Deutschland,[8] but he seems to have been quickly forgotten, both officially and otherwise.
Some years later, however, in 1999, the influential historian-publisher Annette Leo published a biographical sketch on Walter Trautszch,[9] and since then others have also revisited his remarkable, if tragic, life story.
[2][3] A niece of Walter Trautzsch was Gisela Glende (1925-2016), the long-standing boss of the East German Politburo office, responsible for preparing agendas and draft decisions, and for producing the minutes of Poliburo meetings.