26 Facts About Otto Niebergall

Otto Niebergall continued to be a politically engaged Communist politician.

Otto Niebergall was born into a working-class family just outside Kusel, a small industrial town in the hills to the north-east of Saarbrucken.

Otto Niebergall trained for work as a machinist, an electrician and a miner, and these were the sectors in which he worked as a young man.

Otto Niebergall was actively engaged in the local branch of the Metal Workers' Union.

Otto Niebergall was elected to the leadership team itself in 1925.

Otto Niebergall represented the Communist Party as a Saarbrucken municipal councillor between 1926 or 1929 and, formally, 1935.

In 1930 Otto Niebergall married Barbara "Bebi" Hertel whose political outlook was broadly similar to his own.

Otto Niebergall nevertheless led and sustained the organisation in the region, as a result of which, in 1932, he received an eleven month prison sentence, which he served in Zweibrucken.

Between March and October 1934 Otto Niebergall did indeed travel abroad, in order to attend the Comintern's International Lenin School in Moscow.

Otto Niebergall became for a time the area leader for the Communist Party in the Saarland and Rhenish Palatinate.

Otto Niebergall was mandated to use his contacts to organise and deploy a group of volunteers and material in order to fight against a threatened Fascist take-over in Spain.

Otto Niebergall was travelling a good deal during this period, but sources indicate that between 1937 and 1940 he was based in Brussels, organising Civil War support and at the same time continuing, as a regional party leader responsible for his home territory and the surrounding regions, attempting to create a "Popular Front" movement in the Saarland.

Otto Niebergall was arrested on 11 May 1940 while Barbara, with their son who was only a few months old, stayed behind in Brussels.

Barbara Otto Niebergall would be arrested in Brussels by the Gestapo in 1941.

The camp had not been constructed with high security in mind and Otto Niebergall escaped from it on 13 July 1940.

Otto Niebergall achieved significant promotion within the exiles party during the next few years, described by April 1941 as a leader of the German Communist Party leadership for France, Belgium and Luxemburg.

Otto Niebergall was a leading member of it, identified by the code name "Gaston".

Otto Niebergall worked closely with the remarkable Luise Kraushaar who is described in at least one source as his secretary during much of his time with the French Resistance.

Between 1945 and 1948 Otto Niebergall served as the party's chairman of the zone secretariat - effectively local Communist Party leader - for the French occupation zone.

Otto Niebergall had not been expelled from the entire French occupation zone, and in 1948 he settled in Mainz together with his wife, Barbara, his wife's youngest sister, Irma Strauch and his young son.

The boy had been very young when Barbara Otto Niebergall had been arrested by the Gestapo, and since that time he had been looked after and bought up by Irma, his aunt.

Between May 1948 and February 1950 Otto Niebergall served as party chairman for Rhineland-Palatinate.

Otto Niebergall served as a national politician, a member of the West German parliament between 1949 and 1953.

Otto Niebergall spent much or all of his time over the next couple of years in East Berlin from where, between 1953 and 1955, he headed up the Central Party Control Commission of the Communist Party.

Since returning to the west Otto Niebergall had sat as a Communist member of the municipal council of Saarbrucken, a position that he now lost.

Otto Niebergall joined in 1968, becoming in 1971 a member of the regional party executive in Rhineland-Palatinate, and becoming head of the new party's History Commission.