Anton Aschauer

Anton Aschauer (born March 14, 1897 in Traunstein ; † April 16, 1976 ) was a German politician and namesake of the Aschauer group he founded , which was active in the Munich resistance after the National Socialists came to power .

Life

Anton Aschauer was born in Traunstein in 1897 and grew up with his parents in Munich-Haidhausen from 1899 after moving . Aschauer became interested in politics very early on. After completing his training as a milling cutter , he was drafted into military service at the age of 16. A year later he was buried and, seriously wounded, was discharged from the military because of his injuries. He then worked in the Maffei locomotive factory . In 1919 he became a member of the KPD and, together with Max Levien and Eugen Leviné , was a leading functionary of the second Munich Soviet Republic under an alias . In February 1922 he resigned from the KPD because of differences with the party leadership and became a member of the SPD . In 1926 he married the landlord's daughter Rosalia Wolfegger, with whom he ran the Klostergarten inn in Haidhausen in the following years. In the same year the only daughter Rosalinde was born.

In early 1933, when it was still legal, a conspiratorial group around Anton Aschauer had formed within the SPD Ramersdorf section in order to anticipate the state persecution that was expected to be certain. Following the example of the KPD, Aschauer formed groups of three.

Members of the Aschauer group were Berthold Feuchtwanger, the brother of the emigrated Lion Feuchtwanger , and Hans Demeter , who later became chairman of the Munich SPD. In 1933 and 1934 the district produced a few leaflets . Aschauer was the liaison to the SPD functionary Waldemar von Knoeringen , who coordinated the resistance from exile in Prague and supplied it with material. In August 1934, Aschauer, who had apparently been under police surveillance for weeks, was caught packing leaflets and arrested. After two years of solitary confinement in Stadelheim , Aschauer was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 1936, which he served in the Dachau concentration camp . He did not betray his colleagues during his time in Stadelheim, where he was incarcerated for “preparation for high treason”, nor in the Dachau concentration camp, where he was severely mistreated.

Registration card of Anton Aschauer as a prisoner in the National Socialist concentration camp Dachau

In 1941 Aschauer was sent to one of the notorious probation battalions on the Eastern Front , despite his unfit for war because of the serious wound he had suffered from the First World War . In the Riga ghetto , he provided the Jews with medicine and food. After the end of the war he was appointed commissioner for reparation for the prisoners in Dachau. In 1950 Aschauer, whose wife had died in 1941, married for the second time.

Aschauer was a co-founder of the " Association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime " (VVN) and a member of the Munich City Council from 1948 to 1966. In 1975 he suffered a stroke and died a year later on April 16, 1976 at the age of 77.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Münchner Geschichte (n) 17/2012: People who acted when others were silent. December 5, 2012, accessed July 7, 2015 .