Adolf Lentze

Adolf Johann Hinrich Lentze (born June 19, 1900 in Hamburg ; † October 4, 1983 in Hilden ) was a resistance fighter against National Socialism.

Life

Adolf Lentze was the son of the iron turner Karl Albert Adolf Lentze from Magdeburg and the Bremen worker Johanne Elisabeth Lentze, nee. Michalowsky. After attending the elementary school in Lehe in Emsland, where his parents had moved, he received a scholarship to train as an elementary school teacher and attended the preparation institutes in Wunstorf and Bederkesa. In 1919 he volunteered for the Eastern Border Guard and was deployed there and with the 3rd Sailor Artillery Department in Wesermünde . In 1921 he completed his training in Stade with the teacher examination. Since he was then unemployed because he was not hired as a young teacher, he decided to emigrate. In 1922 he immigrated illegally to the USA , but had to leave the country again in 1928. The reasons are not exactly known. One opinion is that he had to leave the USA because of the illegality of his stay, another that this was necessary because of political or trade union activities.

Early interest in questions of politics from a left perspective is demonstrated. It is possible, but not certain, that he joined the KPD in 1919 . As a student in Stade, he led the local group of the KPD and carried out advanced training courses in German, French and Esperanto in the Lower Weser towns for the KPD .

In the year of his return from the USA, Lentze managed to get a teaching job in Emden . A few months later, however, at the instigation of the SPD parliamentary group in the city council and local authorities, he was dismissed. The accusation was that he had made too radical political statements. Lentze was now consistently unemployed, but was active in various functions in the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). At the end of 1932 he headed the RGO's district staff commission. From these years his support for a participant in a rally against eviction in Emden who was shot by the police (“Emden Aufruhr”) is known. He and a second helper arranged for the injured person to be brought to a clinic in June 1932.

After the takeover of power by the NSDAP and its German national allies and after the destruction of the organizational structures of the KPD in the Weser-Ems area (north-west district) and numerous arrests, the KPD reorganized itself. Members met for this purpose on the street and in Lentze's apartment. In mid-September, Paul Beermann , Hermann Fenske , Adolf Lentze, Max Renne , Mathias Thesen and Heinrich Werno came together to form a provisional district leadership in which Lentze took on the role of agitprople leader. Despite the subsequent arrests of participants in the consultation, Lentze and Werno's leadership succeeded in building a new, better protected resistance network ("groups of five") underground, from Emden via the East Frisian and Ammerland fen villages to Wilhelmshaven, along the Wesermarsch via Oldenburg, Delmenhorst and continued to Bremen, where Lentze lived. Part of the activities was the publication of a periodical publication Rote Fahne , for which "the indefatigable Lentze" (Marßolek / Ott) wrote alone or as the main author and whose technical production was supported by individual merchants who sympathized with the KPD. After Werno was arrested, Lentze also took over the management of the organization. Couriers connected the illegal small groups together. However, the Gestapo succeeded in smuggling informers into the network. Lentze escaped an arrest under the title "Lentze and Comrades" in August 1933 and went into hiding under the name Rodenburg with a false identity. He continued his activities against the regime. In the opinion of his biographers Günter Heuzeroth and Johannes Petrich, he demonstrated "an extremely agile figure ... and cleverness". He acted extremely courageously and at the same time disciplined. In early 1934 he was arrested by the Gestapo in his apartment in Bremen, which also housed the printing technology for the Rote Fahne . In total, more than 70 people were arrested.

This was followed by more than a year in pre-trial detention, in which Lentze initially managed to keep in touch with the comrades in freedom and to receive some money from there. After the investigation against the Lentze group had been concluded, 35 other communists were charged with him by the Hamburg Higher Regional Court in 1935 . Lentze received three years imprisonment for preparing for high treason as the "head of the movement" . He responded to his conviction in the courtroom with an extensive counter-speech. With "preparation for high treason" every activity to rebuild the banned KPD was meant. The maximum legal sentence was three years and six months.

After serving his imprisonment in the Bremen-Oslebshausen penal institution, he was in a penal company for six weeks . He was then taken into " protective custody " by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , which he was not able to leave until the collapse of National Socialism in 1945. Various, always positive attestations are available about Lentze in Sachsenhausen, including the Jewish bacteriologist and fellow inmate Kurt Marcuse , who attested to having behaved in the difficult role of the labor supervisor "humane, decent and helpful, especially to the Jewish inmates".

Lentze was one of the prisoners who survived one of the subsequent " death marches " after the camp was cleared on April 21, 1945 . He was assigned to the prisoners' march to Lübeck and, according to fellow inmate Rudolf Sundermann, became one of the camp elders in the Selow camp . According to Sundermann, he understood how to “ease the unbelievable exertion of the prisoners march for the masses.” Finally, until the liberation by the Red Army, he was “with young people from different nations, such as Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, etc. .. . on all roads and roads in Mecklenburg ”. When he was released, he had spent more than eleven years of uninterrupted imprisonment under the most difficult of conditions.

Just a few weeks later, Lentze was appointed to Parchim by the Soviet military administration as head of culture and school council . Since the prominent writer Friedrich Griese , who was highly valued by the Nazi regime and who was often decorated, lived in Parchim, Lentze drafted a political charge against him, which focused primarily on the close connection between Griese and regime leadership. The nameless ex-concentration camp inmate led the Goethe Prize winner (1940) in Parchim as a pioneer, co-sponsor and "beneficiary of the Nazi system" by publicly throwing the library into the garbage. His information formed the substantive basis for Griese's arrest and internment as Nazi-charged in the summer of 1945. The episode about Lentze and the Nazi writer ended with Lentze's defeat, because Griese, whose reply was based on a falsified quotation from Lentze, was already in March 1946 released again. He should be won for the new political conditions. Lentze left Parchim in autumn. In 1946 he was a member of the government in Schwerin .

In 1949 he left the Soviet Occupation Zone and moved to West Berlin for unknown reasons , but apparently did not find any new access to school service in the subsequent episode. In 1951 he went to Aurich (East Friesland) with the family that had now been founded . It is not known whether he still belonged to a communist organization, now or later switched to a different party-political direction, or stayed away from all such formations. In any case, he was one of the initiators of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in East Friesland. In their name he protested in 1955 against the appointment of the right-wing extremist politician Leonhard Schlueter as Minister of Culture of Lower Saxony ("Schlueter case"), which was also attentively registered abroad. He called it a "culture disgrace". In 1956 he turned to the Bundestag with a petition on the subject of "Political activities of emigrants in the Federal Republic".

Lentze and Griese met again in 1952. Griese intended to sue his opponent, whom he described as a “criminal against humanity from that dark time” - meaning the time after the collapse of the Nazi regime - under the West German conditions that seemed favorable to him. That failed. He was informed informally that success was not to be expected and that Lentze could not be criticized. Griese's advance was without official response.

Lentze's supporters in these years included former fellow prisoners, including the temporary mayor of the city of Cologne, Member of the Bundestag and Social Democrat Robert Görlinger , who described him as "always ... a thoroughly honest, decent and characterful person".

In 1957 the family separated. Lentze moved to Cologne alone. There he was now working as an unskilled worker. From here, he sought legal "reparations" for the persecution he was subjected to. Nothing is known about the result. In 1983 he died in the St. Josef Hospital in Hilden .

In the context of a rehabilitation of the Nazi writer Friedrich Griese, the author Reinhard Rösler came back to Lentze's allegations against this writer in 2003. Lentze falsely described Griese as "partisans of the Nazis" with a "hodgepodge of allegations, suspicions, and accusations", resulting in "difficult months" for the accused. Lentze, who had been imprisoned for more than eleven years for his resistance activities against the Nazi regime, was defamed as merely "alleged anti-fascist ". These evaluations stand alone in the literature on Griese and his internment. The Griese biographer Stefan Busch explicitly speaks of "justified accusations" Lentzes and emphasizes his commitment and imprisonment.

literature

• Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Depicted on the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989
• Inge Marßolek / René Ott, Bremen in the Third Reich. Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution, Vol. 3, Bremen 1986

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, pp. 188ff.
2. ↑ Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, p. 190.
3. ^ Inge Marßolek / René Ott, Bremen in the Third Reich: Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution, Vol. 3, Bremen 1986, p. 488.
4. ^ Inge Marßolek / René Ott, Bremen in the Third Reich: Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution, Vol. 3, Bremen 1986, p. 488.
5. ↑ Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, p. 190.
6. ^ Inge Marßolek / René Ott, Bremen in the Third Reich: Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution, Vol. 3, Bremen 1986, p. 488.
7. ↑ See the page of the Ubbo Emmius Society, Emden: [1] .
8. ^ Inge Marßolek / René Ott, Bremen in the Third Reich: Adaptation, Resistance, Persecution, Vol. 3, Bremen 1986, p. 252ff.
9. ^ This and the previous information: Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, pp. 190ff.
10. ↑ See the page of the Ubbo Emmius Society, Emden: [2] .
11. ↑ Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, p. 190.
12. ^ Ingo Müller , The legal treatment of the KPD in the Weser-Ems area 1934/35, in: Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, pp. 208–211, here: p. 210.
13. ↑ Rivka Elkin: The Jewish Hospital in Berlin between 1938 and 1945. Berlin 1993, p. 39; Clemens Marcus, commemoration of November 9, 1938. Jewish cultural property that escaped destruction, in: Auenzeitung. News from the Evangelical Auen-Kirchengemeinde Berlin-Wilmersdorf, No. 22, 2013, p. 10 News from the Evangelical Auen-Kirchengemeinde Berlin-Wilmersdorf ( Memento from February 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
14. ↑ For Sundermann see: [3] .
15. ↑ On the death marches after the dissolution of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp: HP of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation . Brandenburg, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen: Archived copy ( memento of the original from February 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
16. ^ Kurt Stüdemann, On the Mecklenburg Contemporary History. Parchim 1945-1947, Schwerin 1997, pp. 185, 250.
17. ↑ Stefan Busch: "And yesterday, Germany heard us" , Würzburg 1998, p. 45.
18. ↑ Reinhard Rösler, authors, debates, institutions: literary life in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania 1945 to 1952, Hamburg 2003, p. 194; Stefan Busch, "And yesterday, Germany heard us", Würzburg 1998, p. 45.
19. ↑ Stefan Busch, "And yesterday, Germany heard us there", Würzburg 1998, p. 45.
20. ↑ Reinhard Rösler, authors, debates, institutions: literary life in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 1945 to 1952, Hamburg 2003, passim, especially: p. 43.
21. ↑ Misplaatse benoeming in Neder-Saksen. Nazi-vriend become minister voer de cultuurzaken, in: Utrechts Nieuwsblad, 25.1955, p. 5, see: [4] .
22. ↑ Overview 17 on motions from committees of the German Bundestag regarding petitions as of May 30, 1956, see: [5] .
23. ↑ Günter Heuzeroth / Johannes Petrich, Under the tyranny of National Socialism 1933-1945. Represented in the events in Weser-Ems, vol. I, persecuted for political reasons, Osnabrück 1989, p. 194.
24. ↑ Reinhard Rösler, authors, debates, institutions: literary life in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 1945 to 1952, Hamburg 2003, p. 194.
25. ↑ Stefan Busch: "And yesterday, Germany heard us", Würzburg 1998, p. 45.