Otto Niebergall (5 January 1904 - 13 February 1977) was a German politician (KPD). During the twelve Nazi years, most of which he spent abroad, he was a resistance activist.
After 1945 many of the those who before 1933 had been committed members of the Communist Party of Germany and who lived in what, in 1949, became West Germany, moved across to the Soviet sponsored zone, which after 1949 became communist East Germany. Others stopped being communists or ceased to involve themselves in politics. Otto Niebergall continued to be a politically engaged Communist politician. For much of the time he managed to combine this with living in West Germany. That was unusual.
Life
Early years
Otto Niebergall was born into a working-class family just outside Kusel, a small industrial town in the hills to the north-east of Saarbrücken. He trained for work as a machinist, an electrician and a miner, and these were the sectors in which he worked as a young man. In 1918 he was a co-founder of the Saarbrücken Young Socialists ("Arbeiterjugend") group. He was also actively engaged in the local branch of the Metal Workers' Union ("Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband" / DMV). In 1920 he relocated to Hamborn in the Ruhr region which at this time, like the Saarland, remained under French military occupation. In Hamborn, still aged only 16, he joined the Young Communists, in which he subsequently became a member of the district leadership team ("Unterbezirksleitung"). The early 1920s were years of desperate austerity and of widespread quasi-military civil unrest in many parts of Germany. Niebergall joined the "Red Ruhr Army", established in the area as a response to the Freikorps units of unemployed demobilised former soldiers which had emerged in the aftermath of military defeat, and which continued to be active despite the failure in 1920 of the Kapp Putsch.
After the revolutions
Around 1922 he moved back to Saarbrücken and joined the recently formed Communist Party of Germany. Between 1924 and 1935 he was a member of the secretariat of the Communist Party for the Saar region leadership. He was elected to the leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") itself in 1925. In 1925 he also became area leader for the quasi-military Alliance of Red Front-Fighters ("Roter Frontkämpferbund" / RFB) and a member of the party's "Military-Political Structure" ("Militärpolitischer Apparat"), the title by which the party identified its intelligence/information service. He also represented the Communist Party as a Saarbrücken municipal councillor between 1926 or 1929 (sources differ) and, formally, 1935.
In 1930 Otto Niebergall married Barbara "Bebi" Hertel whose political outlook was broadly similar to his own. Widespread economic destitution returned at the end of the 1920s as the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash spread round the globe. In Germany the government responded to the ensuing surge in political extremism with a range of measures that included outlawing the RFB. Niebergall nevertheless led and sustained the organisation in the region, as a result of which, in 1932, he received an eleven month prison sentence, which he served in Zweibrücken.
Nazi years
The political context changed in January 1933 when the Nazis took power and lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. In the carefully choreographed aftermath of the Reichstag fire at the end of February activists and politicians associated with the (shortly to become illegal) Communist Party found themselves high on the government target list. Many were arrested while others fled abroad. In the short-term, however, German communists in the Saarland were in less danger than those in other parts of Germany because the territory was still occupied by the French army. Between March and October 1934 Otto Niebergall did indeed travel abroad, in order to attend the Comintern's International Lenin School in Moscow. Barbara stayed behind, campaigning against unification of the territory with Nazi Germany, a matter which was nevertheless settled in favour of the German government by an overwhelming referendum vote in January 1935.