Paul Merker was a German trade unionist and politician of the Communist Party of Germany who later became a leading official of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
22 Facts About Paul Merker
1.
2.
Paul Merker was still working as a wine waiter, by now in Hamburg, in 1923.
3.
Paul Merker was dismissed from the Politburo and from the Central Committee of the German Communist Party in April 1930 on account of his "extremist left-wing deviations".
4.
Paul Merker was obliged to surrender his leadership of the RGO in favour of Fritz Emrich.
5.
Paul Merker now occupied second tier positions in the party and in 1931 was made available to the Communist International, which prepared the way for a period working outside Germany.
6.
Between March 1931 and May 1933 Paul Merker's services were contracted to the Comintern.
7.
Paul Merker worked in the United States, using the cover name "Max Fischer", as an advisor to the Communist Party there.
8.
Between 1935 and 1939 Paul Merker was again elected to the Central Committee and Politburo of the German Communist Party although the party itself had been banned in German since 1933.
9.
From February 1937 Paul Merker was a member of the Central Committee of the KPD which was now operating from Paris, taking responsibility for party operations in all the countries where party members were no longer able to operate.
10.
Paul Merker himself was interned in 1940 and sent, initially, to Camp Vernet, west of Perpignan, and which was now operating as a concentration camp.
11.
Paul Merker benefitted from the assistance of Mexican diplomats, especially, the Mexican consul-general, Gilberto Bosques, to escape.
12.
In 1946 Paul Merker Marker returned to Germany, where he became a member of the Party Committee, the Central secretariat and the Politburo of the SED, a new political party formed in the part of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union, by forcibly merging the old KPD and SPD parties.
13.
Paul Merker promptly became a member of the Brandenburg regional legislative assembly.
14.
Between 1949 and 1950 Paul Merker was the new country's Secretary of State for Agriculture.
15.
Current knowledge suggests that Stalin's mistrust of Paul Merker dated back at least to 1940, when Merker had shared with Comintern and German Communist party colleagues in Moscow criticism concerning the August 1939 Non-aggression pact between the Germans and the Soviets.
16.
Paul Merker was placed under house arrest and interrogated by the "Central Party Control Commission".
17.
Life in the political fast lane did not resume, however: Paul Merker was sent to live in a small town called Luckenwalde, and here he was given an "HO" restaurant to run.
18.
The Party's central committee published a statement on 20 December 1952, stating that Paul Merker was guilty of having participated, as its leader for East Germany, in the conspiracy recently uncovered in Prague.
19.
Paul Merker had supported the creation of a Jewish state and pleaded for the recognition of Jews as a national minority within Germany.
20.
In January 1956, just over six months after receiving his eight-year sentence, Paul Merker was released from custody.
21.
Paul Merker died in 1969, and his rehabilitation was clearly complete when the state reacted by posthumously awarding him the Patriotic Order of Merit.
22.
Paul Merker's ashes were placed with those of others honoured by The Party, at the Socialists' Memorial in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery at Lichtenberg.