Eugen Schwebinghaus

Memorial plaque for the victims of Nazi persecution at the Ronsdorfer Ämterhaus

Eugen Schwebinghaus (born January 4, 1906 in Ronsdorf , † August 24, 1944 in Bruchsal ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Eugen Schwebinghaus was a trained builder and cabinet maker. In 1922 he became a member of the Communist Youth of Germany (KJD) and in 1924 of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). From 1931 he worked full-time as head of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers (BPRS) affiliated "Interest Group for Workers' Culture" (IfA) in the Lower Rhine district.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in January 1933, Schwebinghaus went into hiding and went to Paris , but returned secretly out of homesickness. He became active in the resistance, among other things as an employee of the illegal KPD state leadership under the former Reichstag member Robert Stamm . After Stamm's arrest , he emigrated to Prague and from there to the Soviet Union . Stamm was beheaded on the scaffold on November 4, 1937 in the prison yard of Plötzensee .

In Moscow , Schwebinghaus was at the International Lenin School under the code name Kurt Frank Kursant . Before completing the course, he took part in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the International Brigades . In 1939 he went back to France and in 1941 was extradited by the French authorities to the German Secret State Police (Gestapo).

After a brief internment, Eugen Schwebinghaus escaped to the Netherlands , where he continued his resistance work. There he worked with the former Berlin KPD city council and editor of Red Flag , Erich Gentsch , together, became a representative of the Communist Party in general, refugee committee and from March 1940 KPD emigration ladder.

After German troops occupied the Netherlands, the 37-year-old was arrested in Amsterdam on April 23, 1943 and sentenced to death by the People's Court . In a final letter to his family, he wrote: “May the future be happier for you as it is the present.” On August 24, 1944, he was executed in Bruchsal prison. His body was handed over to the Anatomical Institute in Heidelberg.

The application of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime - Bund der Antifaschisteninnen und Antifaschisten (VVN-BdA) to name a street in Ronsdorf after Eugen Schwebinghaus was rejected by a CDU / FDP majority in the district council in July 1992 on the grounds that it I was dealing with a communist. Instead, the street was named after an FDP politician. In the following year, the district council decided with the votes of the SPD , FDP and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen to put up a memorial plaque. The CDU abstained because it did not agree to the naming of the victims. Since the administration did not have any money for the board, it was made possible by private donations.

literature

• “We won't break it”. Faces of the Wuppertal resistance . Edited by of the Wuppertal Resistance Research Group. Essen 1995. ISBN 3-9804014-2-1
• Schwebinghaus, Eugen . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ gewerkschaftsprozesse.de
2. ↑ Street fight in Wuppertal on dradio.de v. February 19, 2009
3. ↑ Memorial plaque for the Ronsdorf victims of National Socialism on denkmal-wuppertal.de ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Günter Konrad, Klaus-Günther Conrads: Eugen Schwebinghaus. In: ronsdorfer-buergerverein.de. Retrieved February 1, 2016 .