Albert Kayser

Albert Kayser (28 November 1898 – 18 October 1944) was a German trades union official, political activist and politician (KPD). In July 1932 he was elected a member of the national parliament (Reichststag). By the time democracy was suspended, in March 1933, he had already been arrested and detained by government authorities. He was released at the end of 1933 and spent much of 1934 and early 1935 living "underground" (unregistered with any city hall) engaged in political resistance. Most of the twelve Nazi years he spent in a succession of jails and concentration camps where opportunities for resistance were more limited. He died at Buchenwald in October 1944, probably from a form of Typhus ("Flecktyphus"). An illegal funeral service was held for him in the camp on 22 October 1944.

Political biography Albert Kayser was born in Stettin (as Szczecin was known at that time), a major sea port close to the Baltic coast ("Ostsee" in German language sources) and, before 1945, part of Germany. Slightly unusually, the family into which he was born was registered as "religionslos" – neither Protestant, Catholic nor Jewish. He grew up in Berlin. That year he became a work-place trades union representative. He was involved with the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD), and in 1921, as the USPD broke up, he was one of many former members who joined the recently launched Communist Party of Germany. He represented a Berlin electoral district (Wahlkreis), sitting as one of 89 Communist Party members in a 608 seat parliament.

He was taken to the Sonnenburg concentration camp, in the marshy countryside between Berlin and Posen, where he was held in "protective custody" till 23 December 1933. Then underground party leadership in Berlin nominated him as chief party instructor for Central Germany (Mitteldeutschland) which gave him direct responsibility for training guidance in the party's Thuringia, Halle-Merseburg and Magdeburg-Anhalt regions. As one of nine senior party officers in the country Kayser lived illegally at Wörmlitzerstraße 3 in Halle, using the cover name "Robert Erdmann". Elsewhere it is stated that he was living with his wife and daughter at Groningerstraße 22 in Berlin-Wedding. Albert Kayser survived. This was widely reported and discussed in the government press under headlines such as "No space for central German rabble-rousers" ("Kein Platz für mitteldeutsche Hetzer") and "Culling hatespeak in central Germany" ("Ausmerzung mitteldeutscher Hetzer"). Publicity given to the case and to the death sentence conferred on Kayser spread internationally. A number of exiled top SPD leaders met together with exiled communist leaders at the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris and resolved to bury political differences between Germany's moderate and extreme political left, part of a development that would resonate through German politics for decades. Back in Berlin the government was hard at work to ensure the success of the forthcoming Berlin Olympic Games. It was a bad time for disagreeable international press headlines about the "judicial" execution of government opponents.

He was taken initially to Berlin's Plötzensee Prison. Between February 1936 and 1943 Albert Kayser was imprisoned at the Brandenburg-Görden Prison. International publicity given to his case in 1935 meant that, unlike most prison inmates in Hitler's Germany, Kayser was never completely forgotten in the wider world. Even inside the prison at Brandenburg–Görden, he was involved in organising antifascist resistance and solidarity. Three days later, on 22 October 1944, fellow inmates held an illegal funeral service for him.