Communist Leader Charged with “zionism” Released in East Germany

A prominent Communist leader of non-Jewish stock, whom the present East German regime purged and jailed at the height of the Communist anti-Semitic wave some years ago after accusing him of being a “Zionist,” has just been released from prison and stands a chance of being rehabilitated.

The Communist leader is Paul Merker, former State Secretary in the East German Ministry of Agriculture and a member of the top group of the communist Party, the Politbureau. He escaped from France to Mexico during the war, and was connected with a German-language weekly published there at the time.

Since many of the paper’s readers and advertisers were Jewish, Merker occasionally contributed articles advocating the restitution of Jewish property stolen by the Nazis and the payment of compensation to Jewish citizens of Germany, no matter whether they returned to Germany or remained abroad after the end of the Hitler regime.

In 1952 and early 1953, Germany’s official Communist Party organ charged that, by holding such views, Merker had become” cat’s paw of the U.S. financial oligarchy.” He had “falsely and deceitfully pictured as alleged property of the Jewish people the maximum profits squeezed out of German and foreign workers by monopoly capitalists,” whereas in actual fact the property had only passed from. “Jewish monopoly capitalists” into the hands of “Aryan monopoly capitalists.”

The communist paper also accused him of having denied “Jewish culpability for the rise of Fascism” and of having urged-compensation for stolen Jewish property “so as to enable U.S. finance capital to infiltrate Germany. Here we have the true root cause of his Zionism.” After his return to Germany, he had “continued his services to the Zionist agency,” the Communist paper declared ominously in the very month when the chairmen of all Jewish communities in East Germany fled to West Berlin.

This pillorying of Merker as a “Zionist” was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that he is not believed to be of Jewish descent. Observers believe that, after the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia, the East German Communists were unable to find enough Jews in high party positions who might have been exposed as “Zionist conspirators” and that, for this reason, Merker, having run afoul of East German Communist boss Walter Ulbricht on other grounds, was presented to the public as an “ersatz Zionist.”

Merker, who was reportedly held in solitary confinement for four years, has now returned to East Berlin. The Central Control Commission of the Communist Party is currently engaged in “reviewing” his case, and has already called in witnesses to that end.