Kurt Bachmann

Born June 22, 1909, in Düren in the Rhine region. Figure in the German workers’ movement. By profession a leather sorter.

In 1932, Bachmann joined the Communist Party of Germany. He carried on illegal antifascist activity and in 1938 left for France, where he took part in the Resistance Movement. After his arrest in 1942, he remained in Nazi concentration camps until 1945. In that year he took part in the organization of the Society of Victims of Nazism (SVN), and later was a member of the presidium of the SVN and of the International Federation of Participants in the Resistance Movement, and Victims and Prisoners of Fascism. In 1950 he began working in the secretariat of the board of the Communist Party of Germany. After the party was banned in 1956, he became the Bonn correspondent for the journal Die Tat. In September 1968 he initiated the creation of the legal German Communist Party (GCP). At the first congress of the GCP in Essen, on Apr. 12–13, 1969, he made a report entitled “For Unity of Action in the Struggle for the Democratic Renewal of the State and Society.” He was elected chairman of the party.