Wolfgang Schwarz (resistance fighter)

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Wolfgang Schwarz (born August 25, 1926 in Cologne ) was involved in the resistance against National Socialism as a youth with the Ehrenfeld group within the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates .

Life

Wolfgang Schwarz was born in the working-class district of Ehrenfeld as the son of a Jew and a Protestant mother. The parents separated in 1928. The father emigrated to the Netherlands in the mid-1930s . From there he was deported to Auschwitz in 1940 and killed. Since his mother died shortly after the official divorce in 1935, he and his brother Günther - after a brief interlude with his father - grew up with his grandfather Franz Spitzley and his maternal aunt Gustel, who ran the household for him. His aunt was an active communist and in her youth a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany ; Therefore, after 1933, she was in protective custody in the concentration camp and in the penitentiary for several years . This, too, was a reason not to leave grandfather alone in Cologne. The grandfather tried to protect the brothers, so they were also transferred from the Jewish elementary school to a city school and even baptized Protestants. As a half-Jew, Schwarz is denied admission to the party youth. He also had no desire for it, but preferred to take part, especially from 1939/40, in walks, meetings and other activities of the non-conformist youth in the neighborhood. One of the main characters of the Ehrenfeld group, Hans Steinbrück, lived in the same apartment building as him. After finishing school he was denied his dream job. He had to break off the apprenticeship as a substitute pastry chef . He remained an unskilled technical worker. As such, he was committed to the “Heimatkraftfahrpark” (HKP) in 1944 to repair vehicles for the Wehrmacht. In autumn 1944 it was moved with the vehicle fleet to Ehreshoven Castle in the Aggertal . At HKP he got weapons for the group around Steinbrück. His brother Günther was arrested as a member of this group and publicly executed on November 10, 1944 with twelve other group members without trial. Wolfgang Schwarz was warned and was able to go into hiding.

After the war, Schwarz was able to find shunting work with Deutsche Bahn . He still lives in Cologne. Since the late 1940s, Schwarz has made himself available as a contemporary witness in public and at schools with reports on his life during the Nazi dictatorship. In 2008 he was therefore awarded the Heine bust of the "Friends of Heinrich Heine".

Rehabilitation and honoring

Together with Jean Jülich and Peter Finkelgruen , he took part in the 1984 honoring of the three resisters Bartholomäus Schink , Jean Jülich and Michael Jovy with the award of the Righteous Among the Nations medal in Yad Vashem . The group had hidden Ehrenfeld's Jews in the rubble, provided them with (often stolen) food and thus saved them. It had taken a long time for the then young resistance activists to gain recognition in Germany. After Jürgen Roters had already publicly recognized members of the Cologne resistance groups as district president in June 2005, it took until April 2011 for the five surviving members Hans Fricke , Gertrud Koch , Peter Schäfer , Wolfgang Schwarz and Fritz Theilen to receive the Federal Cross of Merit as Cologne mayor the band could deliver.

literature

See the articles Ehrenfeld Group and Edelweiss Pirates .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Schlößer in report-k from April 13, 2011 online ( Memento from April 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Life After Experienced History
  3. ↑ Roland Kaufhold: The “Cologne Controversy”? In: hagalil.com. haGalil, September 22, 2019, accessed February 18, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Alexander Goeb: National Socialism - Late Honor. In: freitag.de. Retrieved on February 18, 2020 (apparently incorrectly named Wolfgang Schwarz as an honoree, see Yad Vashem database).
  5. ↑ Mattias Pesch: Edelweisspiraten "Role models for civil courage" , in: Kölner Stadtanzeiger from April 14, 2011, p. 26 online (accessed June 23, 2016)
personal data
SURNAME Schwarz, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter during the Second World War
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne