Ewald Klein

Tomb of the three Hofer resistance fighters Hans Merker, Ewald Klein and Philipp Heller in the Hof cemetery

Memorial plaque for Ewald Klein at his house in Hof

Ewald Klein (born February 24, 1899 in Marxgrün , † May 25, 1942 in Dachau ) was a KPD member and resistance fighter against the Nazi dictatorship .

Ewald Klein was the sixth child of the locomotive stoker Heinrich Klein and his wife Christiane. Ewald Klein attended primary school in Hof and then began training as a locksmith . With his journeyman's certificate he went on a journey and worked briefly in the naval shipyard in Kiel . In 1917 he was called up for military service as a Landsturmmann . At the end of the First World War he was with a news unit in Munich . In April 1919, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed there. After they were cracked down, he was arrested and held for two months. He had not participated in combat operations but was suspected of having shot a counterrevolutionary medical soldier.

After his return to Hof he was arrested again during the Kapp Putsch and the invasion of the Chiemgauer Landfahne. Before the district court in Hof he was able to demonstrate that the flare pistol found during a house search was only in his possession for shooting on New Year's Eve. He worked for the Thierauf & Kießling company in Hof and passed his master craftsman examination in 1924. In 1925 he married his wife Babette, née Burger, and moved to the Oberkotzau company Summa . Until the Great Depression in 1929 he had various jobs and was eventually unemployed. In the 1920s, Ewald Klein was active in sports, as a weightlifter he was the winner of the Maingau championship and as a chess player he won the golden federal pin.

In 1928 Ewald Klein joined the Communist Party. On the night of May 1, 1931, with the support of his colleague Arthur Robisch, he climbed the two highest factory chimneys in Hof and raised the red flag with a hammer and sickle . Due to the considerable height, the flags could not be removed so easily and remained hanging for a long time. An attempt to set the flags on fire and make them disappear by burning them down was extremely incomplete. In October 1931, Ewald Klein was arrested again; he was accused of distributing leaflets in front of the Hof police station asking the police to join the striking workers or to refuse to work. After seven months of pre- trial detention, he was charged with “preparation for high treason ” before the Imperial Court in Leipzig . He was sentenced to one year and three months in prison and served the remainder of the sentence from October 1932 to July 1933 in the Nuremberg cell prison .

After his release, Ewald Klein found various jobs again. a. responsible for a machine park in Chemnitz . Shortly after his draft in September 1939, he was taken into so-called protective custody, like Hans Merker was held in Buchenwald concentration camp and transferred to Neuengamme in December 1940 . The hard work in a swamp with inadequate nutrition led to a high death rate, which was offset by new workers from other concentration camps. In 1941 typhus broke out in the camp . Shortly before Christmas 1941, Ewald Klein was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp as ill and unable to work . On May 25, 1942, the camp management informed his family by telegram that Ewald Klein had died of a weak heart. The family who visited the body in Dachau despite the shortest possible deadline had doubts about a natural death. Witnesses spoke of a liquidation, which they brought in connection with the spotted fever or with a personal file of Klein, requested shortly beforehand by an SS guard.

Ewald Klein's urn was buried in the Hof cemetery. A common gravestone commemorates the Hof resistance fighters Hans Merker , Ewald Klein and Philipp Heller . After the war, a bridge in Hof was named after him. The blown bridge, which was named after Ludwig Siebert during the Nazi era , was named after Ewald Klein on September 18, 1945. With the completion of the reconstruction of the bridge in 1948, the city council voted against the four votes of the KPD parliamentary group in favor of today's name in honor of President Friedrich Ebert .

literature

• Rudolf Macht: History of the Hofer Workers' Movement - Volume III / 2 (1924–1945) - Defeat . Hof 1996. pp. 382–385.
• Biographical collection in the Hof Stadtarchiv : L 0554 Klein, Ewald

Web links

• Article in the Frankenpost on the 70th anniversary of Hans Merker's death (January 5, 2015): Resisters from the region and rebellion through secret enlightenment

Individual evidence

1. ↑ District Association of Upper Franconia of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge eV (ed.): War graves in Upper Franconia . Bayreuth 1985. p. 25.