August Wolf (resistance fighter)

August Wolf (born May 25, 1889 in Harzgerode ; † March 8, 1945 there ) was a German printer and social democratic resistance fighter . He died in 1945 under the Nazi dictatorship in the Harzgerode prison under unexplained circumstances.

August Wolf had been a SPD party member since 1921 . In the 1930s he worked as a printer in the Silberhütte powder mill . In 1933 he began his illegal party work and together with his colleagues Hermann Briedenhahn (painter), Willi Rasthorn (fitter) and Otto Trenkel (kitchen master) founded the Waldemar resistance group in 1943 . The group printed leaflets in the Silberhütte (for example: "Down with Hitler") and maintained contacts with the 300 or so Soviet and Yugoslav slave laborers in the Silberhütte and with other prisoners of war. Wolf printed counterfeit food stamps for them in the silver smelter (the death rate among Soviet prisoners of war was 60% at the time). With the distribution of the first leaflets, the search for and persecution of the resistance group began at the Harzgeroder Gestapo branch, which remained unsuccessful until March 1945. The group members were not arrested until March 7, 1945. Wolf was taken to the small prison behind the courthouse on Harzgeroder Marktplatz, where his wife Elise visited him that evening. On the morning of March 8, 1945, according to contemporary witnesses, August Wolf was found dead there by a village police officer (other sources give March 8, 9:00 p.m. as the time of death). The other group members survived the Nazi regime. In the GDR era, August Wolf was considered a murdered resistance fighter . In the village of Harzgerode, it was widely speculated that Wolf killed himself in his cell. This assumption is supported by the oral traditions of the inmate Hermann Briedenhahn as well as by statements of Wolf's wife Elise.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , residents of Harzgerode demanded "an end to the wolf lie". The creation of legends organized by the state about the cause of Wolf's death was criticized, but the merits of Wolf in his role as a resistance fighter remained undisputed. The city administration then removed the memorial that had been erected in memory of Wolf in Harzgerode after 1945. The streets named after him in Harzgerode (previously “Am Ehrenberg”, Wolf lived in house number 36) and Quedlinburg (previously “Heiligegeiststrasse”) were given their original names again. All archive documents that were previously available for August Wolf in the Harzgerode city archive have been lost. In operation Silberhütte a monument to August Wolf was built after the war. August Wolf's grave existed in the local cemetery until the 2000s, today it is in ruins and the tombstone has been moved. As early as 1997, the historian Beatrix Herlemann stated with reference to the destroyed August Wolf memorial that a critical sense of citizenship was slowly developing and that an early reconstruction would be desirable. Today there is a plaque in Ballenstedt "In memory of the victims of fascism" with the name of August Wolf.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Radio HBW street renaming (accessed on July 9, 2016)
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Chronicle 200 years of pyrotechnics Silberhütte 1790-1990 , Harzgerode 1990, pages 17-19
3. ↑ Harzlaut June 2015, page 5. Retrieved July 11, 2016 (PDF, 2.14 MB). 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Testimony of contemporary witnesses from Mr. and Mrs. Zottmann (close acquaintances of Elise Wolf, née Steinecke, who died in 1983), Harzgerode on July 10, 2016
5. ↑ War cemeteries in Harzgerode (accessed on July 9, 2016)
6. ↑ Orally transmitted according to Offspring of H. Briedenhahn, Harzgerode, July 21, 2016
7. ↑ Report by a contemporary witness (accessed on July 9, 2016)
8. ↑ tel. Information from the city of Harzgerode on July 13, 2016
9. ↑ Memorials for the Victims of National Socialism, Volume II, Federal Agency for Political Education, ISBN 3-89331-391-5 , page 506