Ernst Boeckel

Ernst Albert Böckel (born January 14, 1909 in Stedtfeld ; † December 7, 1940 in the Nazi killing center Sonnenstein , Pirna ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism and a victim of Nazi euthanasia .

Life

Ernst Böckel was born in mid-January 1909 as the eldest son of the gardener Andreas Böckel in Stedtfeld. After the First World War had started a year earlier , his father was drafted into military service in 1915. His mother died in the spring of the same year. The six-year-old boy and his two younger siblings were placed in a children's home; later he lived with his grandfather. After graduating from school, he completed an apprenticeship as a gardener in the Trunk nursery in 1926. During this time he joined the Communist Youth Association . Like his father, he became a member of the Red Front Fighter League (RFB) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Ernst Böckel died here:
House C16 of the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center is now a memorial

From 1929 he worked in his father's nursery . Together with his father, he was active as a resistance fighter against National Socialism . With six friends and his father, Böckel copied and distributed KPD leaflets and newspapers. In April 1933, he was serving a six-month prison sentence for this. In anticipation of an armed conflict, Böckel and his like-minded colleagues cleared an explosives store near Deubach . He was then arrested again and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, which he was supposed to serve in the Untermaßfeld prison. When he rebelled against the treatment there, he was knocked down by a guard with a rubber club and subsequently admitted to the Hildburghausen Sanatorium in September 1935 because of an alleged "mental disorder" . On October 4, 1940, Böckel von Hildburghausen was transferred to the Zschadraß regional institute , which served as an intermediate facility for the National Socialists' euthanasia program . From there he was transported on December 7, 1940 to the killing center in Pirna-Sonnenstein on the Sonnenstein near Pirna , where he was murdered on the same day in the gas chamber in the cellar of house C16 .

His father, who lives in Eisenach , was informed on December 14, 1940: “Your son died this morning at 10:45 am and was cremated, the ashes are at your disposal. Expenses amount 3 RM. ” Andreas Böckel was ordered to pay all expenses for the hospital stays of his son afterwards. He had his son's ashes come to Eisenach and buried the urn in the main cemetery in Eisenach .

Honors

Ernst-Böckel-Strasse in Eisenach

• Since 1945 a street in the villa area Karthäuserhöhe in Eisenach's southern district has been bearing Böckel's name.
• On March 1, 1955, the youth club at the Eisenach automobile plant was named "Ernst Böckel".
• In the presence of Reinhold Brunner , city archivist and head of the city's education office, representatives of the Alliance against Right-Wing Extremism Eisenach and around 40 other people present, a stumbling block was laid for him on May 14, 2019 at Ernst Böckel's former home at 75 Stedtfelder Straße in Eisenach ; this was the 100th stumbling block in the city of Eisenach.

literature

• Reinhold Brunner: Eisenach personalities . A biographical lexicon. Ed .: City of Eisenach and Urania Culture and Education Association Gotha e. V. Rhino Verlag, Weimar 2004, ISBN 978-3-932081-45-3 , p. 22, 23 .
• Ulrike Puvogel, Martin Stankowski: Memorials for the Victims of National Socialism. Documentation II: Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia . Federal Agency for Political Education, Bonn 2000, pp. 210f.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Victims database of the Pirna-Sonnenstein Memorial.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Further stumbling blocks relocated in downtown Eisenach. Press release from the city of Eisenach. In: eisenachonline.de. City of Eisenach, May 14, 2019, accessed on June 20, 2020 . 
3. ↑ Birgit Schellbach: Two more stumbling blocks for Eisenach. In: thueringer-allgemeine.de. May 15, 2019, accessed June 20, 2020 .