Karl Bittel was a German left-wing historian and journalist.
14 Facts About Karl Bittel
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Karl Bittel attended school at Freiburg in the south-west of Germany, across the Rhine from Mulhouse.
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Karl Bittel received his doctorate from Tubingen in 1915 for a dissertation on the consumer-co-operative movement pioneer, Eduard Pfeiffer.
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In 1919 Karl Bittel became a member of the newly established German Communist Party.
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Karl Bittel became a lecturer at the Party Main Academy in Jena in 1920, and then editor of a Chemnitz based newspaper called "Kampfer".
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The early 1920s saw a splintering on the political left in Germany, triggered in part by contrasting reactions to the fast moving political events in the Soviet Union, but Karl Bittel remained true to the mainstream Communist Party through the period, becoming head of the Party Central Committee's "Co-operatives Department" in 1922.
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Karl Bittel then remained in the Soviet Union, till 1927 working as Secretary to the Comintern's Co-Operative section.
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Karl Bittel spent the next year or so in detention in concentration camps at Heuberg and then just outside Ulm.
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Karl Bittel was able to live unmolested in his remote lake-side village, focusing on academic research.
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Karl Bittel was even able to have some of his work published: a work involving Paracelsus was printed in 1942.
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Karl Bittel now joined the Party Secretariat and the party's regional leadership team for Baden, where he became Chairman of the Baden branch of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, a post he held till Summer 1949.
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Between 1949 and 1957 Karl Bittel served as deputy head, and then from 1951 as head of the German Institute for Contemporary History.
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Karl Bittel was made an honorary professor at the "Karl Marx University" in Leipzig, and in 1957 became a full professor, with a teaching position, at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Karl Bittel was one of a small but determined group of like-minded historians who promoted the orienting of historical seminars and institutions according to the precepts of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party.