Buchwitz, Otto

Born Apr. 27, 1879, in Breslau (Wroclaw); died July 9, 1964, in Dresden. Active in the German labor movement.

Buchwitz joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1898 and was secretary of a district Social Democratic Party organization in Lower Saxony from 1919 to 1933. He was a Reichstag deputy from 1924 to 1933 and emigrated in 1933. In 1940 he was arrested in Denmark, turned over to the Gestapo, and sentenced to eight years in prison. In 1946 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany; he was a deputy to the People’s Chamber of the German Democratic Republic from 1949. He was awarded the title Hero of Labor and was a laureate of the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples (1959).