Dahlem, Franz

(1892-1981)

   politician; among those who split with the USPD in 1920 to join the KPD. Born in the Lorraine city of Rohrbach, he entered Cologne's SPD after completing business studies in 1913. A soldier in World War I, he joined the breakaway USPD in 1917 and was later a member of Cologne's Workers' and Soldiers' Council.* When in October 1920 the USPD split over Lenin's invitation to enter the Comintern, Dahlem joined those who accepted the summons. He was soon editing the Sozialistische Republik and was elected in 1921 to the Prussian Landtag. In 1923 he became general secretary of the Rhineland's KPD and then went to Berlin* in 1924 to enter the editorial staff of Rote Fahne, the KPD's flagship newspaper.* He was promoted to the Zentralkomitee in 1927 and entered the Politburo in 1928. During 1928-1933 he sat in the Reichstag.*

   As part of the KPD's radical Left, Dahlem led the Revolutionary Trade-Union Opposition (Revolutionare Gewerkschaftsopposition, RGO) in 1931; the next year, however, he was censured for supporting Heinz Neumann.* (The KPD's Neumann wing, which had acquired a realistic fear of the NSDAP, began shift-ing its attacks from the SPD—Moscow's "social fascists"—to the Nazis.) Es-caping Germany in April 1933, he later led the German Communists engaged in the Spanish Civil War. He was arrested in Paris in 1939 and was released to the Gestapo in 1942, but survived World War II at Mauthausen. He was active in the German Democratic Republic.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Taddey, Lexikon; Wheeler, "German Labor."