Karl Bittel

Karl Bittel (22 June 1892 – 18 April 1969) was a German left-wing historian and journalist.

Life Karl Bittel was born in Darmstadt. His father was a bank worker. He attended school at Freiburg in the south-west of Germany, across the Rhine from Mulhouse. He passed his school final exams in 1911. By that time he had already co-founded a Freiburg Wandervogel youth group, for which he produced a news-sheet. Then, between 1911 and 1915, he studied Economics (Volkswirtschaft), Law and History at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg and Tübingen.

Bittel was a volunteer contributor to the "Freiburger Volksstimme", a local newspaper at the popular end of the political spectrum, and served between 1913 and 1916 as Secretary for Consumers Club in nearby Esslingen. At the same time he was publishing articles on the Co-Operative movement. In August 1914 war had broken out, and it ended in November 1918 with military defeat for Germany and her allies. During the revolutionary year that ensued in Germany Bittel was a member of the Soldiers' and Workers' Council in Karlsruhe. In 1919 Bittel became a member of the newly established German Communist Party. Bittel then remained in the Soviet Union, till 1927 working as Secretary to the Comintern's Co-Operative section. In August 1927 he returned to Germany. It was in his new home in a village on the shores of the Bodensee that Bittel was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1933. He spent the next year or so in detention in concentration camps at Heuberg and then just outside Ulm.

In May 1945 war ended. What remained of Germany was divided up into four occupation zones, in which membership of the Communist Party was no longer illegal. Bittel now joined the Party Secretariat and the party's regional leadership team for Baden, where he also became Chairman of the Baden branch of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, a post he held till Summer 1949. In addition, in 1946 he co-founded a Communist Newspaper based in Offenburg, entitled "Unser Tag" ("Our Day"), becoming "licence holder" and editor in chief of the publication till 1948.

Awards and honours 1954: Patriotic Order of Merit in silver 1958: Medal for Fighters Against Fascism 1962: Order of Karl Marx