Jason Matthews

Wolfstern (* 15 December 1897 in Woloka near Czernowitz, today Ukraine, † 16 September 1961) was a Communist, an officer of the Red Army and in the GDR for several years the head of the Institute for German Military History in Potsdam. His brother, Manfred, went as general Kléber into the history of the Spanish Civil War, while his brother Leo was temporarily rector of the Martin Luther University in Halle. His wife Gerda Stern was also active in the communist movement.

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Stern was born in 1897 as the son of a Jewish farming estate in Bukowina, which belonged to Austria-Hungary. After attending the German Volksschule from 1903, he went from 1907 to 1915 to the state high school in Chernivtsi. After that, he was drawn into the Austro-Hungarian army, from which he descended in the rank of a cadet in 1918, since he played a leading role in the revolutionary insurrection in the k.u.k. 113th Regiment. Stern began studying philosophy at the University of Chernivtsi, but he had to break it off because of illegal political activity for the Communist Party of Bukovina. He was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Bukovina in February 1919, and in 1924 he was a party organizer in its Central Committee. In 1924, Stern fled to Vienna and became a member of the KPÖ. On his behalf, he worked as an editor at the press department of the Soviet Embassy in Vienna until 1927, acting as a link to the Comintern. During this time, his commitment as an informant for the Soviet military service GRU, for which he was unofficially active until 1939, also fell into his hands. Like his brother Leo Wolfstern also participated in the Julianvolte 1927 and the Austrian Civil War 1934. Edit this page

Like many others, he emigrated a little later to the Soviet Union, which he became a citizen in 1937. He also lived temporarily in the famous Hotel Lux. Under the cover of Otto, Stern went to Spain in July 1936, where he worked as a member of a special brigade of the Soviet Ministry of the Interior until February 1939. After returning to Moscow, Stern spent the summer of 1941 as a lecturer at the Foreign Languages ​​College and at the Lomonossov University. At the same time he received from 1939 to 1940 a party training at the university for Marxism-Leninism. With the beginning of the war in the Soviet Union, Stern volunteered to the front. He first came to a special brigade of former Interbrigadists. In 1943 Stern was transferred to the main administration of war prisoners at the NKVD. He had, among other things, to influence Generalfeldmarschall Paul so that he joined the Confederation of German Officers. From 1950 onwards, Stern worked as a translator and editor of the Soviet periodicals Soviet Literacy and the New Age, as well as an employee of the Unions Chamber of Commerce. Edit in the GDR source text tomb

In September 1956 he came to the GDR after 20 years in the Soviet Union. As early as 1949 the KPÖ had tried to persuade him to return to Austria. It is to be assumed that his brother Leo played a not insubstantial role in the transfer to the GDR. Wolfstern became a member of the SED and as an officer of the Reserve of the Minister from 1 December 1956 to 31 January 1957. Subsequently he was an employee of the head of the political administration of the NVA. In 1957 Stern became deputy director of the War History Research Council and head of the Kriegsgeschichtliche Forschungsanstalt in Dresden. He was also the head of the initiative committee on the founding of the working group of former officers, which was founded in 1958. From 1958 until his death in 1961, Stern was most recently head of the Military History Institute of the GDR in Potsdam. His urn was buried in the grave of the Pergolasweg of the Socialist Memorial at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Friedrichstadt. Edit source text Standard data (person): GND: 1082242950 (PICA, AKS) | VIAF: 13317943 | Wikipedia People Search

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