Franz Boldt

Franz Arthur Boldt (born October 21, 1894 in Königsberg (Prussia) , † July 19, 1953 in Leipzig ) was a German trade unionist , communist local politician and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Socialization in the Weimar Republic

Boldt grew up with foster parents in his birthplace Königsberg (Prussia) from the age of one. After attending the boys' elementary school, he moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg , where he attended a training school and worked as a runner and office boy. He then completed an electrician training, which he successfully completed in 1915 and from then on worked for the Berlin department store Wertheim .

His war deployment in an infantry regiment in Landsberg an der Warthe and a railway regiment in Serbia was followed by employment in various companies as a metalworker from the end of 1918. After he had already become a member of the Factory Workers ' Union before the war , he moved to the German Metal Workers' Association (DMV) and, after moving to the Erzgebirge in 1922 and employed as a miner, in the Syndicalist Miners Union. Here Boldt took part in the work stoppages in 1924 against the state-decreed increase in working hours and was consequently disciplined, i.e. dismissed.

When he switched to the Carl Hamel company in Siegmar-Schönau , where he found a job as a grinder after being unemployed for about six months, he returned to the DMV. From 1928 he was employed by C. Hofmann in the same city and was elected chairman of the works council. In the company newspaper, he campaigned for better working conditions for his colleagues with critical articles. This earned him a fine in June 1931 for alleged defamation and only two months later he was dismissed from his employment. However, due to a successful legal process, this had to be withdrawn a year later.

In addition to his union activities, Franz Boldt had been a member of the KPD since 1919 , after which it was split up in the meantime from 1920 to 1923 of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD). In the 1926 city council election in Lugau, Boldt initially narrowly failed on the KPD's list, but a year later he slipped in for a resigned MP and retained this mandate until 1929. In 1932 he was re-elected. He was also active on the board of various communist organizations.

Resistance during the Nazi era

On March 9, 1933, several union and party functionaries from the social democratic and communist spectrum were arrested by the SA and the Stahlhelm locality group Lugau. Franz Boldt was among them. Via the Hoheneck and Colditz prisons , he came to the Sachsenburg concentration camp in Saxony , where he was held in " protective custody " until June 8, 1934 . After he was released, he had to report to the police station twice a day. On May 28, 1935, he was arrested again, charged with “preparing to commit high treason” before the Dresden Higher Regional Court and sentenced on May 14, 1936 to a two-year prison term. He served his sentence in Zwickau penitentiary .

Immediately afterwards, on the orders of the Gestapo, he was again deported to Sachsenburg on June 14, 1937, and three days later to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Boldt had to help with the construction of the parade ground, was assigned to the potato peeling and stocking tamping squad and for a time as a room elder in a "Jewish block". In his application for recognition as a victim of fascism , Boldt describes the mistreatment he suffered: He had to do endurance runs until he was completely exhausted and roll over in the snow, incurring permanent suffering. Findings from the Leipzig University Hospital also show that he was named Dr. Well known - camp doctor Dr. Honestly as an "object of investigation" for cruel experiments, in his case the injection of carcinogenic substances. After his release on April 20, 1939, Boldt was arrested again for denouncing a "trust council" in his company, the Deutsche Niles Werken in Siegmar-Schönau, and incarcerated in various prisons for two more years.

Time after World War II

The seven-year period of suffering in prisons of the Nazi regime, according to his own statement, prevented him from actively participating in political and trade union bodies (including the SED , FDGB and the Association of Persecuted Persons of the Nazi Regime ) after the liberation . Franz Boldt suffered from severe shortness of breath, malnutrition, a serious injury to the left shoulder and a tear in the left eardrum. He succumbed to cancer on July 19, 1953 in the Leipzig University Hospital .

literature

• Katharina Neubert: Boldt, Franz Arthur (1894–1953) . In: Siegfried Mielke in connection with Günter Morsch (Ed.): Trade unionists in the concentration camps Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen. Biographical manual. Volume 3, Edition Hentrich, Berlin 2005, pp. 266-270, ISBN 3-89468-280-9 .
• District leadership of the SED, Commission for Research into the History of the Local Labor Movement (ed.): We will not give way to the fascists! The anti-fascist resistance struggle in the Stollberg district (1933-1945), 1982.