Adolf Bittner

Adolf Bittner (born August 6, 1899 in Tropplowitz , Jägerndorf district, Austrian Silesia ; † May 11, 1943 in Plötzensee prison , Berlin ) was a Sudeten German worker and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Life and activity

Bittner was an unskilled worker. From 1917 he took part in the First World War with the Austrian army . After the war he worked in an Upper Silesian coal mine. Politically, he was a member of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in Czechoslovakia at that time .

During a major strike in the Schöningen-Braunschweig lignite mining district, Bittner was arrested in 1923 and temporarily expelled from Germany. He was able to return in the same year. He now settled in Berlin, where he belonged to the KPD until 1926 .

After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by German troops in March 1939, Bittner was from the Secret State Police in protective custody taken. He then worked at AEG in Treptow.

During the Second World War , through his work colleague Arthur Illgen , Bittner came into contact with the underground resistance group around the typesetter Hans-Georg Vötter , which he eventually joined. In the period that followed, Bittner took part in the distribution of illegal pamphlets directed against the Nazi regime, such as Der Auseg and Der Wille zum Sieg .

On September 10, 1942, Bittner was arrested as part of the break-up of Vötter's group. In particular, he was charged with participating in the preparation of an arson attack on the anti-Soviet exhibition The Soviet Paradise . Together with Vötter, his wife Charlotte, Illger, as well as Werner Schaumann and Hilde Jadamowitz , Bittner was indicted before the 2nd Senate of the People's Court . In the judgment of February 5, 1943, the six were found guilty and Bittner and the other three men were sentenced to death.

Bittner left a wife and two children. Today in Berlin a plaque on the house at Yorckstrasse 4–11, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg commemorates Bittner.

Web links

• Short biography of Bittner at Stolpersteine ​​Berlin