Franz Eichhorn (resistance fighter)

Franz Eichhorn (born April 3, 1906 in Hünfeld ; † August 11, 1993 in Weimar ) was a German car dealer , resistance fighter against the Nazi regime and, after the establishment of the Buchenwald National Memorial, leader of visitor groups.

Live and act

Eichhorn learned the hairdressing trade and opened a hairdressing salon in 1929. In 1931 he changed his profession and became a buyer and seller of automobiles in Düsseldorf , where a little later he became self-employed as a car dealer . Because of activist actions against the Nazi system, he was arrested in 1935 in solitary confinement locked . In 1937 he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in Hamm , which he spent in various penitentiaries. On January 18, 1938, he was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp . Here he built a SS - commander -Friseurstube in which he subsequently prominent SS leaders and their wives coiffed. This prominent position made it possible for him to obtain certain easing of detention for numerous prisoners. Although he had not come to the concentration camp as a communist , he found a connection to the illegal resistance organization of the KPD .

After setting up a memorial on the Ettersberg , he became involved there as a guide for visitor groups.

After his death and his burial in the VdN-Ehrenhain in the Weimar main cemetery, an article appeared in the French newspaper La Tribune in which his work in the concentration camp was recognized, to which French prisoners owed their survival.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinz Koch, Udo Wohlfeld: The German beech forest committee. The period from 1945 to 1958 , Weimar 2010, p. 172, ISBN 3-935275-14-5