Willy Leow

Willy Leow
Willy Leow
	Leow (right) marching alongside Ernst Thälmann
Member of the Reichstag
	In office; 1928–1933
Personal details
Born	January 25, 1887; Brandenburg an der Havel, German Empire
Died	October 3, 1937 (aged 50); Soviet Union
Political party	Communist Party of Germany (1919-) ; Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (1917-1919) ; Social Democratic Party of Germany (1904-1916)

Willy Leow (25 January 1887 – 3 October 1937) was a German communist politician and activist.

Life and work

Willy Leow attended elementary school in Brandenburg an der Havel. Then he learned the carpentry trade and was taught at the Workers' Educational School in

KPD

).

1925 Leow was elected the Second Chairman of the Roter Frontkämpferbund (RFB), founded in 1924, the defense and protection organization of the KPD. Leow was often seen marching alongside other prominent KPD and RFB activists such as Ernst Thälmann. 1928 Leow was elected to the Reichstag, where he remained until 1933. Later SPD politician Herbert Wehner, who was himself a communist in the Weimar period wrote decades later in his memoirs, Leow was "a thoroughly corrupt person".^[1]

After the

Nazi seizure of power Leow fled abroad. From 1935 he lived in the Soviet Union. He worked as an editor and head of the German state publishing house in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1936, he was arrested during the Stalinist purges and sentenced to death on 3 October 1937 for organizing a Trotskyist-terrorist group in the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and was shot.^[2]

Post mortem

In the history of the

Damnatio Memoriae; he was deliberately concealed in the history of the GDR and in the public culture of remembrance of the East German state: His person was deliberately not mentioned and traces of his existence have been systematically eliminated from published documents and image reproductions of the GDR. Leow was retouched out of a widely printed photograph which showed him next to Ernst Thälmann during a RFB march in the 1920s. The reason for this practice was that the arrest and murder of Leow (a German communist and refugee from fascism) by the Soviet sister state did not fit into the historical picture of the GDR, and therefore his publications were not allowed to be distributed.^[3]

References

^ Herbert Wehner: Zeugnis, 1982, S. 79.
^ Ulla Plener, Natalia Mussienko (Hrsg): Verurteilt zur Höchststrafe: Tod durch Erschießen. Todesopfer aus Deutschland und deutscher Nationalität im Großen Terror in der Sowjetunion 1937/1938. Reihe: Texte/Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Bd. 27. Dietz, Berlin. 2006. S. 58
^ Walter Hütter: Bilder die Lügen. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung der Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn 2000.

Literature

Leow, Willy. Bundesstifung Aufarbeitung Berlin

[1] Herbert Wehner: Zeugnis, 1982, S. 79.

[2] Ulla Plener, Natalia Mussienko (Hrsg): Verurteilt zur Höchststrafe: Tod durch Erschießen. Todesopfer aus Deutschland und deutscher Nationalität im Großen Terror in der Sowjetunion 1937/1938. Reihe: Texte/Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Bd. 27. Dietz, Berlin. 2006. S. 58

[3] Walter Hütter: Bilder die Lügen. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung der Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn 2000.

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Authority control databases
International	ISNI VIAF
National	Germany
People	Deutsche Biographie