Ernst Strassmann

Ernst Strassmann (born November 27, 1897 , † March 11, 1958 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

After serving in the First World War , Strassmann joined the German Democratic Party (DDP) and was, together with Hans Robinsohn, one of the founders of the Young Democrats , the youth association of the DDP. Together with Robinsohn and Oskar Stark , he campaigned for the protection of the republic in the 1920s. The three of them founded the Robinsohn-Strassmann group in 1934 , which had set itself the task of collecting news and informing other countries about the existence of resistance groups among the German civilian population.

In 1930 he resigned from the DDP, became a district judge in Berlin and a member of the board of the Reich Federation of Democratic Youth Associations. Because of his adoptive father, who was of Jewish descent and who had Ernst declared his biological son, Strassmann had to make several declarations about his own descent. In 1939 he drove to London for the first time with Robinsohn, who had since fled to Denmark , in order to obtain financial support for the German resistance movement. On August 19, 1942, he was planning to travel to Sweden to meet British officials and negotiate support when he was arrested and held in "protective custody" without trial until the end of the war . After the war he joined the SPD and was on the board of the Elektrizitäts- und Wasser AG in West Berlin.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Strassmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography of the German Resistance Memorial Center

literature

• Horst Sassin : Liberals in the Resistance. The Robinsohn-Strassmann Group 1934–1942 . Hamburg 1993 (= Hamburg contributions to social and contemporary history , vol. 30).
• Wolfgang Benz , Walter H. Pehle (ed.): Lexicon of the German resistance . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 399.
• Peter Steinbach , Johannes Tuchel (eds.): Lexicon of Resistance 1933–1945 . 2nd Edition. CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 199.
• W. Paul Strassmann: The Strassmanns. The fate of a German-Jewish family over two centuries . With a foreword v. Jutta Lange-Quassowski , Ernst Strassmann Foundation , Frankfurt am Main 2006.