German historian
Walter Karl Hugo Markov (born Mulec; 5 October 1909 – 3 July 1993) was a German historian. Shortly after he received his doctorate, a promising academic career was interrupted in 1934 when he joined the (by this time illegal) Communist Party and briefly became a resistance activist. In 1935 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison, but ten years later in April 1945, as the Hitler regime collapsed, he was one of a number of long-term inmates from the Siegburg jail who organised their own "self-release", with the help of two pistols that he had been able to purchase, already loaded, on the prison black market.
After the war, according to more than one source he became one of very few historians from the German Democratic Republic who built a reputation for serious historical scholarship beyond the confines of the East German academic establishment.
Biography.
Provenance and an itinerant childhood.
Markov was born into a Protestant family in Graz, an industrial and administrative city along the mainline between Vienna and Trieste, in the heart of what was still at that time the Austro-Hungarian empire. The family was Austrian, albeit with ancestral origins in several different parts of the empire. Franz Mulec (1881–1974), his father, was a sales representative working for the . Franz Mulac came from a Slovenian farming family that had been present in Lower Styria since at least as far back as the eighteenth century. Walter's mother, born Minna Auguste Isabella Schellbach (1889-), is described in sources as a languages teacher. She came from Vienna and was the daughter of a businessman who worked in the printing sector. As a result of her family background she would always regard herself as a true "German German" (). One year after Walter's birth the family moved on to Laibach (as Ljubljana was known at that time) in connection with Franz Mulec's work, where they remained till 1915. For the rest of the war they returned to Graz where Markov attended a "protestant private school". In 1919 they went back to Laibach. Over the next few years he attended school successively in Laibach, Kranj and Belgrade. In 1925, while still at school in Laibach, he involved himself in politics, campaigning with a group of friends for the "Liberal Social Democrats" (SDS). By 1927, when he passed his school final exams (Abitur), he was fluent in several different languages and attending school in Sušak (Rijeka).
University.
Later that year he enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study History. He received financial support from the Austrian branch of the evangelical Gustav Adolf Association and therefore added Theology to his studies, taking care to ensure that, as far as his sponsors were concerned, his principal focus was not on History but on Theology. Markov's autobiography dwells at length on his student years, which were happy and rewarding. He writes of a cycling tour undertaken in the Rhineland during the 1928 summer vacation: the tour was not without disappointments. He complains about the heavy traffic on the roads beside the river, which was unusually heavy due to the Olympic Games being held in Amsterdam: just outside Bonn he was involved in a collision with a motorcyclist: he did not like the very acidic wine people drank in that little city: in Cologne the cathedral was simply too large for a decent photograph: Düsseldorf was worth checking out: but Duisburg and the large heavily industrialised region behind was the "ugliest piece of all Germany". After his Rhineland cycling tour Markov began to find life in Leipzig unattractive: "So unlike the Rhine ... off to the liberal German Rhineland!". Less than a year after that cycle tour, in March 1929 he took the train to Cologne. His sponsors at the Gustav Adolf Association had accepted that his talents and preferences led him towards History rather than Theology, and recommended Cologne University (or, failing that, Bonn) even though in Catholic Cologne an evangelical Theology faculty did not even exist. Following his transfer to Cologne he was assigned lodgings at a parsonage in , more than 50 km (nearly an hour by train) from the city centre. He was to combine his university studies with work as a home tutor. Roggendorf was on the edge of Zone A (the demilitarised zone), while Cologne was still in Zone B, occupied by French forces since the end of war. However, for the history student there were no difficulties encountered in crossing between the two zones. Nevertheless, the distance was too great for daily university attendance, and he missed many lectures. A particular influence during his time at Cologne was the left-wing economic historian who did not shy away from a positive assessment of Soviet economic performance since the October Revolution. He was also impressed by , a specialist on the history of Silesia, who delighted Markov with his trenchantly critical evaluation of the iconic Prussian king, Frederick the Great.
Markov's was able to indulge his enthusiasm for travel with several lengthy cycle trips into the Belgian countryside. However, at the end of 1930 the Roggendorf parson died and his widow gave up on her duties as a landlady. Markov's immediate reaction to the loss of his lodgings was to return to Leipzig, but he subsequently transferred to Berlin University. Berlin was the fulcrum of the polarised politics and gridlocked parliamentary process that would lead, two years later, to the cancellation of democracy in Germany. It is not clear that in Berlin he was particularly diligent in attending lectures. As a student of political history Markov nevertheless enjoyed a ringside seat for the accelerating collapse of what Adolf Hitler had scornfully derided at a party rally in 1929 as the "Republic of Weimar". Markov also managed several more trips, including visits home to his parents in Austria. His own political sympathies lay not with the National Socialists, nor with the shrinking band of political moderates, but with the Communists. For the summer term of 1933 he moved on yet again, this time to the University of Hamburg, intending to study for a doctorate with Richard G. Salomon, an expert on eastern European medieval history. Unfortunately the Hitler government had taken power in January. They lost no time in translating the ugly antisemitic rhetoric of their opposition campaigning into a pillar of government strategy. Salomon was Jewish which made his professorial position untenable. (He would be formally removed from his academic post in March 1934.) Markov's plans needed to be rethought. It was Salomon who recommended that Markov should now move to the University of Bonn and complete his doctoral work under the supervision of the "brilliant" () historian Fritz Kern, who had long since moved beyond the confines of his earlier speciality as a medievalist. Markov now took the train (with his bicycle) to Bonn in October 1933, spending his first night there in a youth hostel. He was filled with confidence that Kern was "the director of the only Institute for Universal History in Germany", he had found his doctoral supervisor of choice. Admiration was evidently mutual.
On 3 January 1934 Fritz Kern invited Markov to dinner. Over a glass of wine, the famous historian urged his latest protégé to produce a dissertation and obtain his doctorate without further delay. He suggested the longstanding Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić as a suitable subject. Just four weeks later, on 1 February 1934, Walter Markov submitted his dissertation entitled "Serbien zwischen Österreich und Russland, 1897-1908". The doctorate, awarded on 28 February 1928, was accompanied by a Summa cum Laude commendation. Kern himself arranged for the dissertation to be published the next year.
Resistance.
It was also in 1934 that Walter Markov, now employed as a research assistant at the University of Bonn joined the Communist Party. In the aftermath of the Reichstag Fire the government had made the party illegal in March of the previous year. Thanks to his experiences at Hamburg, Markov by now had a pronounced political agenda, and was telling friends that he regretted not having joined the party earlier, while he was still studying in Hamburg. An important friend, in political terms, was Hannes Schmidt who had transferred from Hamburg to Bonn the term before Markov made that move. Schmidt already had contacts with the illegal Communist Party while he was still in Hamburg. The two had met in 's lectures. In the dangerous atmosphere of the times they initially dealt with one another cautiously, but once satisfied that they really were both on the same side they formed the nucleus of what became a five-man party resistance cell. They were joined by Günter Meschke, a former mathematics student who had arrived in Bonn in April 1934 hoping to be able to obtain a doctorate in history. Markov and Meschke had got to know one another when they had lived in the same student hostel in during 1931/32. The fourth member of the group was Arthur Toynbee (1910-1975), eldest son to the celebrated English philosopher-historian. whom Markov would later describe as a "highly gifted, good looking, but melancholy Englander who thought that communism was a 'great idea'," but one which could not be pushed through in England. The fifth man was a theology graduate called Hans Schadow. In the new Germany Schadow was doomed to be something of an outsider and therefore a government opponent: his family came from Niedamowo (near Danzig), and he had been unable to demonstrate to the authorities that all four of his grandparents came from good German stock. He had therefore never been issued with an Aryan certificate (). (Markov nevertheless suspected that Schadow's communist commitment might be less than whole-hearted.)
In May 1934 these five men set up a "University Communist Party Group" ("Gruppe Universität der KPD"), commandeering for their purposes a presumably little-used room in a tower assigned to the university's . They agreed to a monthly subscription of two marks each, in order to build up a "fighting fund". Markov, who had a university post, managed to have their meetings in the room in the tower listed as a Russian course, and the university, therefore, provided a five hundred mark payment to cover the summer term. It was both a strength and a weakness of the cellular structure of communist resistance groups that the Markov group had no contact at all with the persecuted communist party officers of the Bonn subdistrict ("Unterbezirk Bonn"), nor with the banned Communist student group ("Kostufra"). An idea attributed to Arthur Toynbee was that they could at least take steps to enlighten English-language tourists visiting the country about the true nature of the National Socialist regime. Appropriate leaflets were drafted. One source for the texts was leaflets that the ever travel-hungry Markov had picked up in Luxembourg in March 1934, when he had taken a bus to the Grand Duchy in connection with a "World Cup Qualifying Match" involving the Germany national football team. They gathered more material when Markov, Meschke, Toynbee and Schadow took a cycling trip to the Saarland which had been under French military occupation since 1919 and was therefore, for most purposes, beyond the reach of the German security services. In Saarbrücken they were able to speak with exiled members of the party leadership, but they were not (at this stage) provided with the contact addresses that they had been hoping for. While they were in the Saarland Markov took the precaution of opening a bank account with a French bank which he thought might be of use in the future.
Back in Bonn, the group discussed further moves. There was discussion of a possible assassination in front of the Alexander Koenig Museum in connection with an expected visit to the city by Hermann Göring, which might be used to attract further recruits to the cause. Eventually, they managed to establish a link with the underground Communist Party. This came about through Hannes Schmidt who by now was engaged to a woman classified by the authorities as a half-Jew. As a drummer and jazz fan, Schmidt had acquired some "street credibility" in local "Bohemian" circles. Schmidt was able to make contact with a pharmacist called Charlie Fromme (1908-1958) and a bookshop owner called Karl Limbach (1911–1972) in October 1934, which turned out to be the long-awaited contact with the party leadership for the local subregion (). It turned out that