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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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 Kurt Müller was one of the highest ranking communist leaders in Germany, who was taken into custody during the Stalin's purges in the GDR. Born in Berlin in 1903, the toolmaker joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1920, and was active at home and abroad as a full-time functionary for the youth league. In 1932 he was dismissed as a member of an allegedly "anti-Party group" and sent as a worker to the soviet Gorki Car Factory. After his return he headed the work of the illegal Communist Party in southwestern Germany for a few months. In 1934 he was arrested by the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and sat until 1945 in various prisons and concentration camps, the last five years he spent in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After his release, Müller became vice chairman of the KPD in West Germany and was in the first German Bundestag in 1949. In March 1950 the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) ordered him to East Berlin and arrested him in violation of his parliamentary immunity. inHe first went to the remand prison in the Albrecht Straße in Berlin-Mitte, where he was temporarily interrogated by the then State Secretary in the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), Erich Mielke. In August 1950 he was transferred to the central prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the so-called U-boat. In 1951 he finally intowent to the new Soviet Central Prison in Berlin- Karlshorst. After months of interrogation and various methods of torture, Müller bewas supposed to be one of the main accused detainees in a planned show trial made in the GDR. Among other things, he admitwas supposed to admit to having been an agent of the Gestapo and at the behest of Trotzkis terrorist acts against Stalin and other Soviet leaders. He was also supposed to acknowledge that he had executed orders of Tito and the British and American secret service The show trial was, however - partly because of Stalin's death - not performed. In 1955 a pecial court in Moscow sentenced Müller instead to 25 years in prison. In connection with the release of the last German prisoners of war and civil prisoners by the Soviet Union, Müller was able to return some time later to the Federal Republic. In an open letter to the former East German Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl in 1956, he denounced the inhuman conditions of detention in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and called in vain for rehabilitation and punishment of those responsible. In 1957 he joined the Social Democratic Party and worked, until late in his life, as a research assistant at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Kurt Müller died in 1990 in Constance |
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