33 Facts About Fritz Selbmann

Fritz Selbmann spent the twelve Nazi years first in prison and then, after 1940, in a succession of concentration camps, but survived.

Fritz Selbmann attended school locally and then in 1915 relocated to work as a miner near Bochum.

Fritz Selbmann undertook factory work during this period and, in 1916, became a member of the Woodworkers' Union.

In 1918 Fritz Selbmann was a member of the soldiers' soviet for his battery.

Fritz Selbmann then joined the workers' and soldiers' soviet in Naumburg and was a member till early in 1920 of "Grenzschutz West", one of a number of paramilitary "Black Reichswehr" units made up of former soldiers of the German Empire.

In 1924 Fritz Selbmann became organisation leader for the local Communist Party branch in Bottrop.

Fritz Selbmann returned as the party's Trades Union Secretary within the Team Leadership for the economically crucial Ruhr region.

Fritz Selbmann combined his membership of the Prussian parliament with other party functions, serving as "Polleiter" with the regional party leadership team in Upper Silesia from May 1930.

Fritz Selbmann was elected not simply as a "list candidate", but as a representative of Electoral District 29.

The Communist Party vote share increased further in the November 1932 election and Fritz Selbmann retained his Leipzig seat.

On 7 February 1933 Fritz Selbmann was one of the participants at the "illegal" Sporthaus Ziegenhals meeting, celebrated subsequently as the last meeting held by the German Communist Party leadership before the participants were arrested and killed, or in some cases managed to escape abroad.

Fritz Selbmann was held till May 1940 at the Waldheim penitentiary where some or all of his sentence was served in solitary confinement.

Across Germany, as war deaths took their toll of manpower, administration of daily life in concentration camps was increasingly delegated by the camp guards to trusted inmates; the decisions of "friends" meant that Fritz Selbmann was set to work in the vehicle repair shop of the camp brick making operation where, as he later recalled, the work was "not hard or especially dangerous".

Fritz Selbmann managed to escape and made his way back to Leipzig.

In Leipzig, Fritz Selbmann immediately took on the leadership of the "Provisional Central Committee of the Antifascist Bloc".

Fritz Selbmann was a member of the political leadership class: a return to national politics beckoned.

In 1948, after stepping down from his regional ministerial position in Saxony, Fritz Selbmann moved to Berlin.

Fritz Selbmann was appointed deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission, which can be described as "the top administrative body" in the Soviet occupation zone.

Fritz Selbmann was one of several senior administrators who became a government minister.

Fritz Selbmann served as an SED member of this legislative body between 1949 and 1963.

In 1953 Fritz Selbmann Selbemann headed up the German side in the commission that oversaw the transfer of the final tranche of "Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaft" businesses to the East German government.

Fritz Selbmann displayed considerable courage, walking into the crowd of more than 10,000 angry strikers, and then clambering onto an office desk from which he attempted to address the crowd.

Fritz Selbmann served, between 1955 and 1958, as a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and, within the presidium of the Ministerial Council, as Chairman of the Commission for Industry and Transport.

Fritz Selbmann lost his Central Committee membership and the other offices in 1958.

Fritz Selbmann was accused of having supported the so-called Schirdewan-Wollweber-Ziller faction, at the party conference at which it became clear that the East German leader Walter Ulbricht had changed his mind about implementing a barely perceptible introduction of certain elements of a free market economy into the East German system.

Fritz Selbmann received a "strong reprimand" from the Central Committee.

Between 1958 and 1961 Fritz Selbmann was employed as a Deputy Chairman in the National Planning Commission, a large and amorphous government agency.

Fritz Selbmann was made head of the Department for Recording and Allocating the Means of Production.

Fritz Selbmann served between 1961 and 1964 as the first chairman of the People's Economic Council which was created in 1961.

Fritz Selbmann served between 1969 and 1975 as a vice-president of the German Writers' Association.

Fritz Selbmann worked as a freelance writer in East Berlin until his death in 1975.

Fritz Selbmann lived and worked, during his final years, in the Berlin quarter of Muggelheim, and after he died, in 1977 the Junior School there was renamed in his honour.

Fritz Selbmann was a recipient, in 1960, of the Banner of Labor and in 1969 of the Order of Karl Marx and, in recognition of his contribution to literature, of the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic, Class II.