Kurt Gossweiler

In a lecture at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in Brussels in 1994, Gossweiler declared that "anti-Stalinism" to be the "main obstacle to the unity of all anti-imperialist forces and the communist movement". He defended Joseph Stalin and stated that the purges of the 1930s had saved the Soviet Union from a "fifth column" and thus secured victory in World War II.

In 1988 Gossweiler received an honorary degree from the Humboldt University. He was also active in the Stasi.

Upon his return to Germany he joined the Socialist Unity Party and became a teacher at a local party school. He devoted himself to the study of contemporary German history at the Humboldt University and received his doctorate in 1963 with his work Die Rolle des Monopolkapitals bei der Herbeiführung der Röhm-Affäre (The Role of Monopoly Capital in the Röhm Affair). Gossweiler received the Bronze Patriotic Order of Merit in 1973. He was a research assistant in the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the DDR.

After the start of the Second World War Gossweiler was drafted in to the Wehrmacht and in 1943 he defected to the Red Army and attended an anti-fascist school. He was also active in the National Committee for a Free Germany.

Born in to a communist family, he was a member of the Socialist Student Union from a young age. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 he was active in the now illegal Young Communist League of Germany. After graduating from high school he studied economics in Berlin and later became a member of the Reich Labour Service.

Kurt Gossweiler (November 5, 1917, Stuttgart – May 15, 2017, Berlin) was a German Marxist–Leninist historian and economist specializing in the history and economic structure of fascism.