Busch, Ernst

Born July 6, 1885, in Bochum; died July 17, 1945, in Nottinghamshire. Field marshal of the fascist German Army (1943).

Busch fought in World War I and then served in the Reichswehr. In 1938 he began to command the VIII Army Corps and fought in the Polish Campaign of 1939. In October 1939 he was appointed commander of the Sixteenth Army during the French Campaign and on the Soviet-German front. In November 1943 he became commander of Army Group Center and was placed in the reserves after the defeat in Byelorussia in August 1944. In March 1945 he became commander of a grouping of German troops in northwestern Germany. He died in captivity in England.

Born Jan. 22, 1900, in Kiel. German (German Democratic Republic; GDR) popular stage singer (baritone) and dramatic actor. Member of the German Academy of Arts. Member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Busch was born into a worker’s family. He has been an outstanding propagandist for revolutionary songs. He worked in E. Piscator’s Political Theater (from 1927) and the Theater am Schiffbauerdanim. Since the early 1930’s, Busch has performed as a singer. In cooperation with the poets B. Brecht and E. Weinert, as well as the composers H. Eisler and K. Weill, he wrote a number of popular songs, including Song of the United Front and The Comintern. As an antifascist, he emigrated from Germany in 1933. From 1937 to 1939 he was a fighting member of the International Brigade in Spain. From 1943 to 1945 he was in the Moabit and Brandenburg prisons.

Since 1945, Busch has been one of the leading actors in the German Theater and since 1950, the Berliner Ensemble Theater. His best roles have been the cook in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Galileo in Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Busch created a style of vocal performance that is characterized by an incisive declamatory quality, energy, and an oratorical expressiveness. He appeared in the USSR in 1936, 1949, and 1957. He won the State Prize of the GDR in 1949, 1956, and 1970; and the International Lenin Prize For Strengthening Peace Among Nations in 1972.