Adolf Wicklein (resistance fighter)

Adolf Wicklein (born January 26, 1886 in Neuhaus-Schierschnitz , † January 5, 1945 in Weimar ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime . After a judgment by the People's Court , he was killed with a guillotine in the inner courtyard of the Weimar Regional Court .

Life

Adolf Wicklein was the son of a postal worker. After attending elementary school, he learned the job of eye inserter, a job typical of the Sonneberg toy industry. He was active in the Socialist Workers Youth (SAJ) and was active in the workers gymnastics club. At the end of 1918, Wicklein lived in Mengersgereuth-Hammern , where he helped found the local KPD group. In 1920 he actively campaigned in the Sonneberg district for a joint strike by SPD and KPD members against the Kapp Putsch . To fend off attacks against the Thuringian coalition government of the SPD and KPD, he committed himself in 1923 to the establishment of a " Red Hundred ", which was dissolved after the occupation of Thuringia by the Reichswehr and banned by the SPD-led Reich government.

The wave of terror against the political opponents of the Nazi regime that began after the Reichstag fire caught thirteen KPD members in Mengersgereuth at the end of February 1933. They were arrested and taken to the Nohra concentration camp near Weimar, the first concentration camp in the German Reich . As a so-called “ protective prisoner ”, Adolf Wicklein and his comrades had to live there under inhumane conditions and were exposed to physical and psychological abuse. When she was released after more than eight weeks, she was warned not to discuss the conditions of detention and to continue her political activities. When they returned home, they were monitored by the Gestapo and recorded in so-called black lists . The local entrepreneurs did not dare to give them work. In view of this situation, Wicklein moved with his second wife Frieda Wicklein and the two youngest of his five children to Neuhaus-Schierschnitz, his birthplace. But even here he couldn't find a permanent job. The family had to live on his wife's low wages and what his odd jobs brought in. In Neuhaus he looked for and found contact with comrades whom he knew from his political activities before the First World War . A small group of like-minded people, of which Wicklein belonged, met regularly to listen to messages from " enemy broadcasters " - especially those from Radio Moscow and Beromünster . They spread this news in different ways and were in connection with other illegally working groups in the Thuringian region.

Some members of this group were exposed in the mid-1930s, sentenced to prison terms with the loss of their civil rights and declared "unworthy of defense". Wicklein only escaped arrest by accident. When the regime was preparing for war, he too found work again: one of the dirtiest and most unhealthy that the porcelain factory in Neuhaus had to offer. He had to knock out and wash out used raw material sacks so that they could continue to be used. He later got a job as a capsule turner there. One day when a number of large objects were rendered unusable in the large turning department, the management dismissed all possible “suspects”, including Wicklein. The Gestapo was unable to clear up this act of sabotage . The NS local group leader in his penultimate place of residence, Lindenberg, is said to have said that “the whole Wicklein family should be exterminated”. After quitting his job in Neuhaus, Adolf Wicklein moved with his wife and daughter Ella to the house at Drehweg 63 in Sonneberg. In the meantime, he had been given a job as a capsule lathe operator in the Hering porcelain factory in Sonneberg-Köppelsdorf . He worked there until he was arrested again in the summer of 1944.

In Sonneberg, Adolf Wicklein met the driver Otto Eichhorn-Gart and his wife Martha, who lived in the same house. At the beginning of 1944, the Wicklein and Eichhorn-Gart families helped several Soviet prisoners of war who had fled from a work assignment and who they found hiding in the garden shed on the property of their home. The activities of the families in supplying the prisoners of war with clothes and food were registered by the supervising authorities, so that in the summer of 1944 the Gestapo carried out a search of the house of the Wicklein family . A radio and some documents were confiscated. Wicklein was arrested at work and Gestapo officers investigated his place of work and the area around him. During these days the Gestapo also arrested the Eichhorn-Gart couple and the locomotive driver Friedrich Parchwitz, who lived in the neighboring house. The authorities had been informed about Parchwitz, who came from Lorraine, that he had friendly private contact with a French slave laborer with whom he had conversations that were incomprehensible in French. Wicklein and Parchwitz were locked together in a cell in the Gestapo prison in Weimar and were alternately interrogated intensively. Since Adolf Wicklein denied complicity of his fellow inmates and other people under persistent severe abuse, Parchwitz, who denied any knowledge or fraternization with war opponents, was released from prison after a few weeks. The Eichhorn-Gart couple remained in custody because there was evidence of illegal procurement of textiles and food.

After his release from prison, Parchwitz reported to close family members about the cruel interrogations in the Gestapo prison. Adolf Wicklein was beaten into unconsciousness several times there. They were also given Wicklein's razor in their cell for unsupervised use and as a subtle incitement to commit suicide. On December 2, 1944, the People's Court met in Rudolstadt in the criminal case against Adolf Wicklein and against Otto and Martha Eichhorn-Gart. Wicklein's daughters and wife attended the trial. When Adolf Wicklein took a seat in the dock, he let his prison smock slide down a little as if by chance. His shoulder and upper arm were marked by abuse. The death sentence issued by the People's Court hit his wife and children hard. His son Werner had submitted a pardon. The Nazi authorities did not shy away from charging Adolf Wicklein's wife for the costs of detention, trial and execution. An informal "receipt" in the court file proves that his body had been handed over to the anatomy department of Jena University on the day of execution .

A letter was also sent to his wife on January 5, 1945 informing her without a salutation: “The death sentence against Adolf Wicklein has been carried out today. Publication of the obituary is not permitted. "

Adolf Wicklein's wife, Frida Wicklein, died in February 1955 at the age of 56 from the consequences of her work in the porcelain industry, which was harmful to health.

memory

In the GDR, Adolf Wicklein was honored as an anti-fascist and resistance fighter:

• In both his birthplace Neuhaus-Schierschnitz and his last place of residence, Sonneberg, a street was named after Wicklein during the GDR era. Both street names were eliminated after the fall of the Wall.
• The company vocational school of VEB Elektrokeramik Sonneberg (EKS), the company to which the former Hering porcelain factory belonged, and the company sports association EKS and a combat group unit that bore his name were dissolved in 1990.

literature

• Memorial sites for the victims of National Socialism. A documentation by Stefanie Endlich, Nora Goldenbogen, Beatrix Herlemann, Monika Kahl and Regina Scheer, Volume II 1999, p. 881

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heimatgeschichtlicher Wegweiser to Places of Resistance and Persecution 1933–1945, Volume 8 Thuringia; Edited by TVVdN-BdA and the German Resistance Study Group 1933–1945; Hamburg undated. In it, together with Udo Wohlfeld, the chapter: Kreis Weimarer Land, Hamburg undated, p. 289, ISBN 3-88864-343-0