Hugo Paul (politician)

Hugo Paul (28 October 1905 - 12 October 1962) was a German politician (KPD). In 1932 he was briefly a member of the country's national parliament ("Reichstag"). Hugo Paul was born into a working-class family in Hagen, an industrial city a short distance to the south of Dortmund. On leaving school he embarked on an apprenticeship as a toolmaker. He joined the Young Communists when he was 15, and became a member of the Communist Party itself in 1923. He held a leadership position with the Young Communists in Remscheid. In 1928 he joined the party leadership team (Bezirksleitung) for the Lower Rhine region and in 1929 he became a volunteer contributor to "Freiheit", a party newspaper published in Düsseldorf. In May 1931 Hugo Paul was in the Soviet Union: his stay there proved a defining and lasting experience. In July 1932 he was elected to the national parliament ("Reichstag") where, representing the Düsseldorf-East electoral district, he sat as one of 89 Communist Party members of the chamber. 1932 was a year of mounting political crisis, and a second general election took place in November 1932, in which the Nazi Party lost 34 seats and the Communist Party actually gained 11. This time Hugo Paul was not elected, however. In January 1933 the successful Nazi power seizure heralded a rapid switch to single-party dictatorship. The Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933 was immediately blamed on "communists". Directly after the régime change Huge Paul became a "party instructor" for the (now illegal) Communist Party in the Düsseldorf and Mönchengladbach sub-regions. While visiting a printing shop where a new (illegal) party publication was to be produced, he was arrested in Düsseldorf by the Gestapo on 22 June 1934. He was taken to the city centre torture cellar at a Königsallee address where he was very seriously mistreated. In November 1934 the special "People's Court" at Hamm sentenced him to a 30-month jail term. The charge was the usual one of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").