Kurt Müller was the deputy chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (German: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands; KPD). He was one of the victims of the Stalinist purges in the early 1950s.[1] Müller was arrested in East Germany in March 1950. He traveled from West Germany, believing he would be attending an important meeting, only to be accused of being an enemy agent and Trotskyite.[2] While in Soviet custody, he was interrogated by the Stasi chief Erich Mielke, and spent six years imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen camp, the former Nazi concentration camp which continued operating as NKVD special camp Nr. 7 under NKVD control in the Soviet Occupation Zone.[3]
Müller wrote to Otto Grotewohl complaining about physical abuse and conditions in the prison. He protested his innocence and accused his interrogators, including Mielke, of breaking the constitutional laws of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).[4]
Müller was not the inspiration for the anti-Nazi character Kurt Muller from Lillian Hellman's play Watch on the Rhine (upon which the 1943 film is based); that character was based the Soviet spy Otto Katz.[5]
References
edit- ^ Scott, Carl Eric, ed. (2014). Totalitarianism on Screen: The Art and Politics of The Lives of Others. United States: University Press of Kentucky.
- ^ Koehler, John O. (2008). Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police. United States: Basic Books.
- ^ Megargee, Geoffrey P. (ed.). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I. United States: Indiana University Press. p. 1325.
- ^ Jones, Sara (2014). The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 91.
- ^ Giovacchini, Saverio (2001). Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal. United States: Temple University Press.