Helmut Damerius

Helmut Damerius ( born December 16, 1905 in Berlin-Wedding; † September 29, 1985 in East Berlin) was a member of the Communist Party and founder and director of Agitpropgruppe column left, director and actor. As an emigrant in the Soviet Union he was innocent from 1938 for many years in Soviet prison. After his rehabilitation in the 1950s, he directed the concert and Gastspieldirektion the GDR.

Journey

Damerius was born in 1905 in Berlin as the son of a gardener and a florist and spent his youth in the "red wedding ". In the 1910s he made an apprenticeship as a florist, worked as an errand boy in a upholstery shop and later as a house painter. First political impressions he gathered in a circle of Lankwitzer " Friends of Nature ". 1922 Damerius joined the " Anarchist - Syndicalist Youth of Germany " ( SAJD ) and 1923 in the KPD. He was a member of the "proletarian voice choir Berlin -Steglitz " and the "proletarian theater in Berlin -Mitte ". Damerius founded in 1927/28 the Agitpropgruppe " column links ," which he also directed for many years. For his successful advertising Damerius work was honored by the party in the spring of 1931 with a four- week trip to the USSR. Damerius took the opportunity, the " Left column " permanently emigrate to the Soviet Union. Here he performed particularly against foreign workers. He studied at the State Institute of Theatre Arts and acquired Soviet citizenship.

On March 17, 1938, he was on false charges by the secret police NKVD, the secret he had been an employee since 1936, was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka prison. Later he was charged Damerius in a closed trial because of " espionage " and sentenced him in October 1938 in Moscow to seven years in a labor camp. It was followed by seven years in prison in degrading conditions in the so-called "correctional camp" Solikamsk ( Northern Urals, Perm region ) in which Damerius had to work hard in the woods. Immediately afterwards, followed by two more years in prison. 1947 Damerius was released on the condition of the prison camp in Kazakhstan to live in so-called "free settlement". In Kazakhstan, he had to endure a further eleven years without that there was an escape for him.

In May 1955, the wrong decision was set aside from the time of the Great Terror and Damerius was rehabilitated, where it said in the cancellation decision:

" According to the decision of the War Crimes Tribunal of the Moscow Military District on 22 September 1955, the verdict of 1938 is repealed and Helmut Damerius restored to all rights. The former statement of Wanda Bronskaja that Helmut Damerius wanted to advertise the Hitler Youth is fictitious. "

In 1956 he was allowed to leave the GDR, but here was the " strict and criminal penalties edition, " not about his past in the Soviet Union to report orally or in writing. From 1960 to 1961 Damerius was director of the artist - agency of the GDR.

In his last years Damerius worked on his past writing. In the early 1980s he began sneaking about his terrible experiences and the " years of his senseless arrest, the loss of his mid-life " to write. In 1982 he handed over the completed manuscript secretly Professor Werner middle two. Damerius died in September 1985 in East Berlin. 1990 his memories were under the title Under False accusation - published 18 years in taiga and steppe posthumously.

Writings

• About ten seas to the Center of the World: Memories of the " column left". Henschel, Berlin 1977.
• Under a false accusation: 18 years in taiga and steppe. Building, Berlin and Weimar, 1990, ISBN 3-351-01776-6.