August Streufert

August Karl Hans Streufert (born August 5, 1887 in Negast near Stralsund , †  December 26, 1944 in Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg) was a German politician (SPD).

Live and act

Streufert grew up on a farm near Stralsund. He came from the second marriage of both of his parents. From his parents' earlier marriages, he had several half-siblings on both his father's and his mother's side.

After attending primary school, Streufert learned the carpentry trade . After completing his training, he worked for three years for various master carpenters in Pomerania, Mecklenburg and Holstein. From August 1908 to 1914, Streufert was active in the Stralsund woodworking industry. At the same time he also joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

First World War and Weimar Republic

From 1914 on, Streufert took part in the First World War, most of which he experienced on the Franco-German front. As a result of a serious war wound, when he was shot in the chest that caused a lung to collapse, Streufert was no longer able to pursue the profession he had learned after the war, as he had to stay away from the dusty environment of a carpenter's workshop due to his vulnerable lungs. Instead he got a job in December 1921 at the Stralsund employment office, where he worked as an employment agency and deputy managing director. On October 1, 1928, he was taken over as head of department by the Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung. At the same time, Streufert married. The marriage resulted in two sons. Streufert also adopted a girl.

Parallel to his civil service career, Streufert began to get involved in his party with increasing success in the 1920s. As a member of parliament, he held various political offices. From March 1919 he was a city councilor in Stralsund. He also belonged to the civic college of his hometown Stralsund, from 1921 he was parliamentary group leader of the SPD. From 1929 he also sat as a representative of the people in the provincial parliament of the province of Pomerania and from September 1930 to November 1932 for constituency 6 in the Reichstag in Berlin.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the takeover of the NSDAP Streufert has faced increasingly political persecution. In August 1933 he was declared an enemy of the state by the government and dismissed from civil service. Since at the same time a ban was imposed on third parties to employ Streufert, from then on he was de facto subject to a professional ban. His wife divorced him.

Streufert experienced the majority of the National Socialist dictatorship in the community of Raisdorf near Kiel , where he settled in a small single-family house with his second wife Ella (Elli), his second son from his first marriage and a son from the new marriage. He earned his living with a small shop, which he soon had to close again, as only a few customers dared to go into the business described by the SA with defamatory slogans, and later by selling vegetables at a weekly market and as an employee of the German branch of one Dutch company. As a former parliamentarian, he found himself exposed to constant harassment by government agencies and in particular by the Gestapo , which had repeatedly arrested him since 1934. Streufert, who was active as an opponent of the Nazi regime, was part of the social democratic underground movement in the 1930s. During the war, he helped those persecuted by the Nazi regime such as Jews and shot down British and American pilots to hide and take them abroad.

A few weeks after the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Streufert was arrested in August 1944 as part of the so-called Aktion Gewitter and taken to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died in December 1944. In the camp commandant's official notification of death to Streufert's wife, his death was attributed to pneumonia. The mistreatment of Streufert by the camp staff, suspected by his son, is unproven but quite likely.

Commemoration

Memorial plaques on the Reichstag

Today the August-Streufert-Weg in Stralsund and the August-Streufert-Straße in Raisdorf are named after him. In addition, a plaque in the memorial is dedicated to Streufert in memory of 96 members of the Reichstag who were murdered by the National Socialists in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin.

literature

• August Streufert . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Volume 1: Deceased Personalities. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. GmbH, Hanover 1960, p. 304.
• Helmut Ohl: Action grid - The Reichstag member August Streufert. A German fate. Ostsee-Verlag, Raisdorf 1994, ISBN 3-9802210-4-0 .
• Siegfried Streufert: Dragon Wind . Aina Kai Books, Harrisburg and Raisdorf 1997, ISBN 0-9644318-2-3 .
• Harald Schultze and Andreas Kurschat (eds.): "Your end looks at ..." Protestant martyrs of the 20th century. 2., ext. and verb. Ed., Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2008, ISBN 978-3-374-02370-7 .

Web links

• Literature by and about August Streufert in the catalog of the German National Library
• August Streufert in the database of members of the Reichstag