Alex Horstmann

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Alex Horstmann (born February 8, 1891 in Cottbus ; † May 26, 1971 in Görlitz ) was a German cloth maker and anti-fascist resistance fighter .

Life

He was born in Cottbus in 1891, the son of a cloth maker . In 1897 the Horstmann family moved to Görlitz, where Alex first attended elementary school, then switched to the Catholic school in Liebenwerda . Since he didn't like the atmosphere at this school, he left it again in 1904. He began an apprenticeship as a cloth maker in the Wolf cloth factory in Görlitz. During his apprenticeship he attended evening courses at the textile school. The aim of his intensive training was that he could later work as a sample applicant and draftsman. In 1905 he co-founded a youth workers group in Görlitz. As usual at this time, Alex Horstmann went on a hike after completing his apprenticeship , which took him to the cities of Bautzen , Chemnitz , Neumünster , Aachen and Brandenburg an der Havel . During his wandering he had many contacts with the workers in the industrial centers. As a result, young Alex developed a solid political attitude that was supposed to be particularly positive towards the textile workers. In 1908 Alex Horstmann joined the textile workers' association. At the end of his military service and after the wounds he had suffered in World War I had healed , he returned to Görlitz. But since he couldn't find a job in his hometown, he moved to Wolfen, where he found a job in the IG-Farben fertilizer plant .

In January 1920 Alex Horstmann joined the KPD, which earned him that he was blacklisted because of his political activities. He also lost his job at IG-Farben . So he started working in the Bautzen cloth factory . Here he married the seamstress Marta Kieschnick in 1923, with whom he lived in Bautzen until 1931. From 1924 to 1931 he was a city councilor for the KPD in Bautzen. In 1928 he had been delegated to Moscow through his function as city councilor to complete a course of several months at the Moscow Lenin School . From this he returned to Görlitz in 1932. When the fascists seized power in 1933 , Alex Horstmann organized the illegal resistance in Görlitz, in which he played a major role in the successes. In April 1933 he was arrested and imprisoned in Leschwitz concentration camp (from 1936 this district of Görlitz was given the name Weinhübel ). Paul Schwerin, a comrade in arms of Alex Horstmann, wrote in his memoirs about Alex Horstmann: "The SA bandits had smashed our comrade Alex Horstmann so much over several nights that he was just a loose bundle of nerves and all limbs trembled. He was over Night turned gray. " In 1934 Alex Horstmann was sentenced to two years in prison for preparation for high treason. After serving his prison sentence, he was arrested again in 1937 and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp , where he was incarcerated until 1943. Then he worked as a draper again until 1945 . After fascism was finally crushed by the Red Army in Görlitz , he and three other communists, social democrats and other deserving residents from bourgeois circles were summoned to the Soviet headquarters on May 9, 1945, where the city commander, Colonel Nesterov, gave him according to order no. 2 the certificate of appointment to the city council for trade and industry was presented.

The reconstruction and the establishment of the production in Waggonbau Görlitz is thanks to Alex Horstmann. After the merger of the KPD and SPD, he became a member of the SED and from 1949 to 1951 he was Arthur Ullrich's first secretary of the SED district leadership in Görlitz. From 1951 to 1957 he was director of the jacquard and tableware weaving mill in Eibau. Then he retired. Horstmann belonged to the party cadre who followed developments in the GDR with critical eyes. Disappointed with this development, Alex Horstmann withdrew from political activity. Nevertheless, he had done great things for the development of the city. He died on May 26, 1971 in Görlitz.

Awards and honors

Individual evidence

  1. Neues Deutschland , April 28, 1971, p. 5.