Herbert Crüger

Herbert Crüger (17 May 1911 – 17 January 2003) was a German political activist and politician (KPD) who, as a young man during the Nazi years, became caught up in espionage activity. During the postwar decade, as the division of Germany seemed to have become permanent, millions of people fled from East Germany to West Germany. More unusually, Herbert Crüger was one of those who, having ended up in "the west", crossed the internal frontier in the other direction, probably, at least in part, because his communist politics made it hard for him to obtain suitable employment in the west. In the east, he became a university lecturer and author. In 1958, he fell foul of a political purge and spent some years in the vast Bautzen penitentiary. He was released in 1961 but had to wait until 1990 for his formal rehabilitation.

Biography Herbert Crüger was born in Berlin-Rixdorf. His father worked as a book printer, but died in September 1914 after an intestinal operation. He attended school locally. Because of their financial situation, there were no school fees to pay; but his brothers had left school as soon as allowed in order to contribute to the family's budget. Herbert was impatient to do the same. When he left school he was still too young to join the navy, so he joined the merchant navy as a ship's boy ("Schiffsjunge") after his Uncle Adolf and Aunt Anna had helped him convince his mother to let him go. But in October 1927 he turned up at the home of two cousins in Hamburg, clutching a small suitcase containing a couple of shirts and underwear. Uncle Friedrich, his Hamburg relative, knew a "Heuerbaas" (maritime jobs agent), a small man with a beard who spoke no German but only the Hamburg dialect.

Almost immediately, he joined the Rote Jungfront, which was the youth section of what amounted to the paramilitary wing of the Communist Party. During 1932/33 he worked as a "technical" (i.e. military) leader with the Red Front Fighters ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / "Rote Jungfront") for the organisation's Berlin-Neukölln sub-district. For a couple of months during the summer in 1933 he left Berlin to stay on a farm and work with the Landvolkbewegung (loosely "National Peasants' and Farmers' movement") in East Prussia. At the start of that year the National Socialists had taken power and almost immediately transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Non-Nazi political activism was banned. The Landvolkbewegung had many of the characteristics of a political party and Crüger's involvement with it was illegal.

At the beginning of August 1934, as he met a comrade by the entrance of a function they were attending at the "Haus Vaterland", a large restaurant in the Potsdamer Platz, the two of them were surrounded by four men and detained. He returned to Prague in 1938, but moved on again in September, presumably in connection with the incremental German occupation. By the time he arrived in Zürich he had acquired a Czechoslovak identity and was using the name "Josef Novák".

During the early summer of 1940, rumours began to circulate that the German army was about to invade France. It seemed unlikely that the invasion would take place across the Franco-German border which was well defended, but in Switzerland there was a belief that the Germans might seek to invade either through Belgium to the north or through Switzerland to the south. A precautionary general mobilisation of the Swiss army took place in September 1939 and during the early months of 1940 many Zürchers moved south and east towards Ticino and Graubünden, believing the higher mountains would offer greater safety than the relatively flat central belt of the country. The German invasion of France, when it came in May/June 1940, used the northern route, but the Swiss government remained intensely nervous, and during 1940s Crüger and Danegger made plans to try and emigrate to Mexico, where they had contacts or to the United States of America. But then the message came through from the party leadership that members of the German Communist Party exiled in Switzerland should stay in Switzerland. This put an end to their plans to escape across the Atlantic. During the Summer of 1940, the Swiss authorities prepared a number of labour camps: the plan was to intern all able-bodied foreign residents and set them to work in the national interest. In September 1940 Crüger was sent to the Felsberger Labour Camp near Chur, in Graubünden. In Felsberg he became part of a labour gang of between 120 and 150 people set to build a supposedly strategic road. Most of the gang were Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany or Austria. A handful of the labourers had fled Germany because they were communists.

Between 1948 and 1950, Crüger served as the second secretary of the regional Communist Party for Württemberg. He later wrote that he encouraged a living understanding of Marxism as a theory in need of further development, and discouraged a tendency to see Stalinism as the definitive version of it. Joseph Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 did not lead to an outburst of liberalism east of the "Iron Curtain", but in some of the quieter recesses of people's homes and in the universities there seems to have been some relaxation of the taboo on questioning aspects of Stalin's record. Three months later the East German uprising was little reported in the west and rapidly (and brutally) suppressed on the ground, but it deeply shook the confidence of the East German ruling establishment. The authorities immediately let it be known that the uprising had been a counter-revolutionary outburst, but its timing, directly after an increase of the number of hours in the standard working week, and in the context of entrenched postwar austerity, persuaded Crüger that sufficient explanation for the mass action by the workers on the city streets, most notably in Berlin, did not need the support of some underlying tortuous political conspiracy theory. at the university and cultural institutions with which he was involved. He urged that political discussions at the university should not be suppressed, with a particular focus on Heinrich Saar, the newly appointed director of the university institute at which he worked, who was known to have been an anti-Nazi activist and a victim of political persecution during the Hitler years. He urged an overcoming of the dogmatic resistance of the party against attempts to broaden democratic practices within it. Discussions never reached the stage of concrete irrevocable proposals, however. On 5 December 1956, Crüger even addressed a letter to the Party Central Committee in which he argued Steinberger's case and insisted on his innocence. The latter was marked for the personal attention of the national leader (and first-party secretary), Walter Ulbricht.

Steinberger was one of those who had been arrested along with Wolfgang Harich who had been promoting the advantages of socialism with a human face. In the eyes of the authorities Crüger's determined attempts to defend Steinberger confirmed his role as one of those intellectuals who represented a threat to the government. At the party's Third Universities Conference, which took place between 28 February and 2 March 1958, under the slogan "Clarity through conflict. On the successful battles against unMarxist opinions", Crüger and his former institute director, Heinrich Saar, were the focus of a sustained political attack. Later during March 1958 Crüger himself became the last victim of a series of arrests and show trials against "reformist intellectuals". He was arrested by officials from the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and held in investigatory custody at the Stasi detention centre in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen until December of that year. Found guilty of "High Treason" ("schwere Staatsverrat") he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. His official status as a victim of National Socialist persecution was revoked. Following conviction he was transferred to the Bautzen penitentiary. Walter Janka, Wolfgang Harich and other members of what was by now being identified as "the [Harich] group" were already being held at the facility. Meanwhile, President Pieck had died in the late summer of 1960 and Walter Ulbricht had become, in effect, head of state as well as being head of the government. By now the government nervousness that had surged after 1953 was beginning to abate. Early in 1960 Mathilde Danegger, still making frequent appearances on East German cinema and television screens and still regarded by the authorities as relatively "reliable", sent a letter to Ulbricht, pleading for mercy (ein "Gnadengesuch") on behalf of her husband. The letter was positively received. The eight-year sentence was reduced to five years. Then, having regard to the fact that two thirds of the five-year sentence had already been served, at Easter 1961 Crüger was released on probation. The next year his official status as a victim of National Socialist persecution was reinstated.

There was at this stage no question of returning to his former position at Berlin University. Instead, following his release, Herbert Crüger was employed as a research assistant at the (East) German Academy of Sciences. Crüger also worked at the Institute for Economic History as a researcher for Jürgen Kuczynski, an economist of such intellectual and political eminence that, remarkably, the authorities never presumed to cast aspersions on his sometimes off-beat conclusions on the East German reality of Soviet-style Marxism. Possibly because, as a longstanding member of the Communist Party of Germany, he thought it unnecessary when he immigrated in 1951, Herbert Crüger had at this point still never joined East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED). He did so in 1966.

During the changes that assumed a new momentum in 1989 and then, in 1990, led to reunification, Herbert Crüger was formally rehabilitated on 2 May 1989 through a court of Cassation decision which reversed the court decision that had led to his imprisonment in 1958/59, and which also gave legal effect to his political rehabilitation. Fittingly, just over two weeks later East Germany held its first free and fair parliamentary election. As the old SED (party) struggled to reinvent itself for a democratic future, he also lost very little time in joining its successor organisation, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). By now well past normal retirement age and based just outside Berlin he also became a member of the executive of the local Königs Wusterhausen branch of the "Interessenverband ehemaliger Teilnehmer am antifaschistischen Widerstand, Verfolgter des Naziregimes und Hinterbliebener, kurz Interessenverband der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" (IVVdN), a relaunched version of the old East German Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime ("Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes" / VVN).