Otto Niebergall

Otto Niebergall (5 January 1904 – 13 February 1977) was a German politician (KPD). During the twelve Nazi years, most of which he spent abroad, he was a resistance activist.

After 1945 many of those who before 1933 had been committed members of the Communist Party of Germany and who lived in what in 1949 became West Germany, moved across to the Soviet sponsored zone, which after 1949 became communist East Germany. Others stopped being communists or ceased to involve themselves in politics. Otto Niebergall continued to be a politically engaged Communist politician. For much of the time he managed to combine this with living in West Germany, which was unusual.

Life Early years Otto Niebergall was born into a working-class family just outside Kusel, a small industrial town in the hills to the north-east of Saarbrücken. He trained for work as a machinist, an electrician and a miner, and these were the sectors in which he worked as a young man. In 1920 he relocated to Hamborn in the Ruhr region which at this time, like the Saarland, remained under French military occupation. In Hamborn, still aged only 16, he joined the Young Communists, in which he subsequently became a member of the district leadership team ("Unterbezirksleitung").

After the revolutions Around 1922 he moved back to Saarbrücken and joined the recently formed Communist Party of Germany. Between 1924 and 1935 he was a member of the secretariat of the Communist Party for the Saar region leadership. Widespread economic destitution returned at the end of the 1920s as the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash spread round the globe. In Germany the government responded to the ensuing surge in political extremism with a range of measures that included outlawing the RFB. Niebergall nevertheless led and sustained the organisation in the region, as a result of which, in 1932, he received an eleven month prison sentence, which he served in Zweibrücken.

War resumed in September 1939, and after eight months during which western Europe held its breath, on 10/11 May 1940 the German army invaded Belgium. Otto Niebergall was arrested on 11 May 1940 while Barbara, with their son who was only a few months old, stayed behind in Brussels. Barbara Niebergall would be arrested in Brussels by the Gestapo in 1941. Identified, eventually, as a "political prisoner" she would spend the later war years in the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, but survived. He remained the organisation's president even after the 1944 liberation of Paris in which he participated, and following which the C.A.L.P.O. ceased to be illegal in newly liberated parts of France and - at least in the Paris region which quickly became a magnet for refugees from further east - transformed itself into a desperately needed welfare organisation, providing support for the most acutely needy war victims.

After the war: two Germanys Otto Niebergall returned to Saarbrücken in August 1945. Between 1945 and 1948 Niebergall served as the party's chairman of the zone secretariat - effectively local Communist Party leader - for the French occupation zone (which included, but extended far beyond, the Saar Protectorate). During 1946/47 and again, after the restoration of democratic processes, between 1953 and 1957, he served as a municipal councillor in Saarbrücken.

Niebergall had not been expelled from the entire French occupation zone, and in 1948 he settled in Mainz together with his wife, Barbara, his wife's youngest sister, Irma Strauch and his young son. The boy had been very young when Barbara Niebergall had been arrested by the Gestapo, and since that time he had been looked after and bought up by Irma, his aunt. Since the Communist Party had effectively ceased to exist in East Germany back in 1946 when it had been subsumed into the Socialist Unity Party, this placed him in the anomalous position of heading up from East Germany a commission that purported to be responsible for enforcing party discipline in a (declining) Communist Party that restricted its activities to West Germany. These contradictions may explain why in 1955 he formally returned to the Saarland. The ban was "due to the aggressive and combative methods that the party used in its Marxist-Leninist party struggle to achieve its goals". From the perspective of one relatively sympathetic source Otto Niebergall now faced renewed persecution. Since returning to the west Niebergall had sat as a Communist member of the municipal council of Saarbrücken, a position that he now lost. He returned once again to East Germany. In the east he was a member, between 1957 and 1971, of the (West German) Communist Party Central Committee (which would have been illegal if he had returned to the west).

Despite continuing political rivalry, after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, at first imperceptibly, cold war tensions between the two parts of Germany became less acute, or at least slightly less unmanageable. 1968 saw the creation in West Germany of the German Communist Party. The name was different, but only slightly. Much the same could be said for the politics, the close links to the Soviet sponsored East German sister party, and the party membership. But the "new" party was not banned. Otto Niebergall joined in 1968, becoming in 1971 a member of the regional party executive in Rhineland-Palatinate, and becoming head of the new party's History Commission. In or before 1971 he relocated from east to west for the last time, again making his home in Mainz. However, by now he was for most purposes retired. In 1972 he was elected chairman of the "Interests Association of German Former Resistance Fighters ("Interessengemeinschaft ehemaliger Deutscher Widerstandskämpfer" / IEDW).

Otto Niebergall died on 14 February 1977 in Mainz.

Awards and honours 1970 Order of Karl Marx Star of People's Friendship Order of Lenin Medal of the Liberation