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Heinrich George | Helmut Kind | Karl Heinrich | Ewald Ernst | Kurt Müller | Alfred Weiland | Arno Wend | Helmut Brandt | Georg Dertinger | Max Fechner | Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Wolfgang Harich | Walter Janka | Walter Linse | Paul Merker | Sigrid Paul | Rudolf Bahro | Heinz Brandt | Jürgen Fuchs | Gerulf Pannach | Michael Sallmann | Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson | Bärbel Bohley | Freya Klier | Stephan Krawczyk | Vera Lengsfeld | Ulrike Poppe
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 The Berlin journalist Alfred Weiland was an independent Communist, who was in custody for years in the GDR because he participated in the resistance against the Stalinist regime in East Germany.
Weiland was born in 1906 in the workers district of Berlin-Moabit and worked as a mechanic and telegraph operator. In the mid 1920s , he joined the radical left-wing Communist Workers' Party (KAP). After the Nazis seized power, he was taken into so-called protective custody and was in the Hohenstein concentration camp until 1934. Although he was under police surveillance after his release, he organized the illegal labor council’s communist groups until he was confiscated into the Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1944. After the end of World War, Weiland began to regroup the council communists in Berlin in May 1945. For tactical reasons, the majority of its members joined in the KPD / SED, bBut just as they had been working illegally against the Nazi dictatorship, they organized the resistance against the Soviet regime. Weiland built the network of the conspiratorial "International Socialist Group" in East Germany. In the magazine "New Start", which was mimeographed illegally since 1947, Weiland stood up for a free socialism. Weiland also maintained contacts with anti-communist organizations like the Task Force against the inhumanity and the East Bureau of the SPD.
Since 1946, Weiland was under surveillance by the Soviet secret police. On November 11th, 1950, he was kidnapped in West Berlin and taken into the central remand prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen.; In 1951, he was transferred from Hohenschönhausen to Berlin-Karlshorst. In vain, the Social Democrat Herbert Wehner advocated for his release. Despite months of interrogations, the indictment "espionage" was not reached, since he recanted the confession extracted under torture - perhaps this saved his life. Instead, Weiland was handed over to the Ministry for State Security, and in August 1952, condemned him to 15 years in prison by the district court of Greifswald because of "formation of a Trotskyist group". He was later transferred to the jail in Bützow-Dreibergen, where he participated in an inmate strike, and later the penitentiary Brandenburg-Görden.
After his early release in 1958, Weiland went back to West Berlin, where he devoted himself to ending political persecution in the socialist countries. As a member of the SPD, he was criticized the late 1960s, the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and the recognition of the communist regime by the Social Democratic Ostpolitik. Towards the end of his life he was increasingly skeptical about the left-radical ideas of his youth. Alfred Weiland died in 1978 in West Berlin. |
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