Max Silbermann

Max Silbermann (18 January 1896 - 5 February 1968) was a German politician (USPD, KPD). He served as a member of the Saxon regional parliament ("Landtag") between 1931 and 1933.

Life Silbermann was born in Ehrenberg (Kriebstein), a village in the hills between Leipzig and Dresden. His father was a brewer. As a young man he trained and worked as a gardener and as a furrier. Between 1914 and 1918 he performed military service as a soldier during the First World War. Silbermann was held in "protective custody" in various concentration camps till the beginning of September 1935. After his release he remained under close police surveillance. In 1936 Silbermann moved from Saxony to the south of Germany where he engaged in "illegal work" against the Nazi régime. He was rearrested and detained in 1942, but his period of detention was relatively brief. In 1944 he was in contact with the Resistance in Alsace. In 1945 he settled on the eastern side of the Rhine and was a Communist Party official in Baden, under French military occupation between 1945 and 1949 . In 1947 he returned home to Saxony which during this period was administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. For some time Silbermann served as Döbeln district secretary of the Peasants Mutual Aid Association ("Vereinigung der gegenseitigen Bauernhilfe" / , VdgB). This was one of the mass organisations being set up in the Soviet zone as part of the transition towards the Leninist model of one-party dictatorship. He now lived, till his death, in Ehrenberg, the village of his birth.