Philipp Dengel

Philipp Dengel (15 December 1888 – 28 March 1948) was a German communist journalist and politician. Dengel was a member of the Reichstag for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) between 1924 and 1930, a member of the KPD Central Committee and Politburo, and an editor of Die Rote Fahne. Dengel was a close ally of KPD leader Ernst Thälmann until they fell out over the so-called Wittorf affair in 1928, for which he was demoted within the KPD and removed as a candidate for the 1930 federal election. Dengel lived principally in Moscow and worked as an official for Comintern between 1931 and 1947. Dengel returned to Germany shortly before his death in East Berlin in 1948.

Early years Philipp Dengel was born on 15 December 1888 in Ober-Ingelheim, a village west of Mainz in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. His father, also named Philipp Dengel, was a producer and distiller in the German wine industry. In March 1919, Dengel switched from the SPD to the recently formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He was a contributing editor to Die Republik, a daily newspaper directed by the polymath and pacifist Wilhelm Herzog. In Berlin during early 1920, Dengel participated in defeating the Kapp Putsch and briefly became a member of the extremist breakaway Communist Workers' Party. Between September and December 1920, he visited Moscow in the Soviet Union.

In May 1921, Dengel joined Die Rote Fahne newspaper, which by this time had become a KPD publication, as foreign policy editor. The next year, he was switched to work as a senior journalist with newspapers backing the party in Germany's principal industrial regions further to the west. At the start of 1924, Dengel took a party appointment as Polleiter (loosely "policy leader") with the regional KPD leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for the Wasserkante region surrounding Hamburg. Later that year, he moved to the Lower Rhine region, appointed regional Polleiter in August 1924, by now using for party purposes the pseudonym "Schmidt".

Reichstag member In the first 1924 federal election, Dengel was elected as one of 62 KPD MPs of the Reichstag. In July 1925, at the KPD's tenth party congress held in Berlin, Dengel was elected to the Central Committee, remaining a member through a decade of mixed political fortunes till 1935. Maslow and Fischer retained their Politburo memberships for the next few weeks, but under Thälmann's leadership the existing Politburo itself was sidelined by the alternative team, which proved adept at capturing the support of other influential comrades.

In the late summer of 1928, at the sixth Comintern World Congress which took place in Moscow, Dengel was elected a member of the organisation's executive committee and of its praesidium. He succeeded Heinrich Süßkind whose fall from grace, in the eyes of Stalin and Thälmann, was evidently more absolute than his own. A new KPD Central Committee was elected comprising just fifteen members, in contrast to the previous committee elected in 1929 which had consisted of 38 member. With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes clear that the new slimmed down Central Committee was made up of supporters of Walter Ulbricht. Dengel, despite being based in Moscow at the time and having already been a Central Committee member for ten years, was now excluded from it. Attempts were made to revive the Lutetia Circle later in 1936, with the KPD leadership represented by Franz Dahlem and Ulbricht. ("Bildet die deutsche Volksfront!) Für Frieden, Freiheit und Brot!" There are reports that as early as 1929, Dengel was forced by serious illness to cut short a Comintern mission overseas. There is no indication that he became more actively involved in party work after his return to the Central Committee ten years later.

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union which, that same day, Dengel suffered a serious stroke from which he would never properly recover. In 1944, he was listed as a member of the Soviet sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany, but he was no longer playing any active political role. It was as an invalid that he returned with his wife to East Berlin in the Soviet Occupation Zone in September 1947, where he died there six months later.