Eugene Zander

Eugen Zander (born May 27, 1902 in Aachen , † 1971 ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism . He became known because he is said to have saved the life of the later Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in the concentration camp .

resume

Zander worked as a gardener for the city of Cologne during the Weimar Republic and was a member of the KPD . According to the Gestapo files , he lived in Cologne- Lindenthal at Dürener Strasse 400. On January 26, 1936, eight years before Adenauer, he was arrested and on April 24, 1937 for "preparation for high treason" (the usual indictment against Communists and Social Democrats) to eight years in prison convicted. According to the verdict, Zander had become a member of the KPD in 1930 and a member of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition from 1930–32 . In February 1934 he was recruited for the illegal KPD. His criminal acts had consisted of collecting and paying contributions, distributing illegal brochures and driving the head of the illegal KPD district leadership in the Middle Rhine, Otto Kropp , to Andernach . Kropp and his successor Ulrich Osche had attempted in 1935/36 to rebuild the Cologne KPD after it had been broken up by the Gestapo for the second time.

Rescue of Konrad Adenauer

As part of the grid action , Konrad Adenauer was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to a reception camp on the Cologne-Deutz exhibition grounds. There, Zander was the Kapo responsible for the new prisoners. Zander brought the depressed and emaciated former political opponent and now fellow prisoner in as a roommate and looked after him. When he discovered in the office that Adenauer was to be transported to Buchenwald with the note “ return undesirable ” , he managed to transfer his supposedly seriously ill protégé to a Cologne hospital with the help of his good relations with the camp doctor. From there, Adenauer fled to be friends with the Roedig family at the Nistermühle in the Westerwald. Although he was soon arrested again there, he escaped the probable death in Buchenwald.

According to the Adenauer biographer Henning Köhler , the Zander report in Paul Weymar's Adenauer biography is fictitious. Köhler suggests that this story is intended to justify the serious consequences that Adenauer's flight had, especially for his wife Auguste. After Adenauer's escape, she was arrested by the Gestapo and died in 1948 of the long-term consequences of a suicide attempted while in custody. While in custody, Adenauer's whereabouts had been extracted from her with the threat that her children would also be arrested.

There is also an affidavit from Walter Eugen Weinberg (born in 1901 and sentenced to one year in prison on May 5, 1944 and interned in the exhibition center) in the archive of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) in Sankt Augustin the widow Hanna Gerig handed over the removal of Otto Gerig and Joseph Roth from the Deutz camp. In the testimony, he wrote that he was a camp senior himself at the time. He, too, was finally transferred from the exhibition center to the Buchenwald concentration camp on January 28, 1945 .

After the war

Zander himself was brought to Buchenwald concentration camp before the end of the war. After the liberation of the prisoners by the 3rd US Army , he wrote from there on April 12, 1945: “From KL Buchenwald you, dear Dr. Adenauer, best regards and wishes for a successful and happy future in our fatherland liberated from Nazi terror. We hope to be back in our beloved Cologne soon. ”Adenauer noted:“ Greetings from the communist camp management at Messe Cologne ”.

Zander finally returned to Cologne and became a horticultural inspector for the city of Cologne. Since he was still a staunch communist, the city of Cologne refused to accept him as a civil servant in 1954. According to the Adenauer biographer Peter Koch, Konrad Adenauer stood up for him in a letter to his son Max Adenauer , who was meanwhile Cologne's senior city director. Adenauer is said to have later characterized him as a communist "of the idealistic kind".

Web links

• Konrad Adenauer and the communists - a difficult relationship

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Henning Koehler. Adenauer. A political biography . Propylaeen, Frankfurt / Berlin 1994. pp. 318-321
2. ↑ ACDP, Gerig estate, 01-087-002 / 5
3. ^ Archive of the Buchenwald Memorial