Friedrich Frerichs

Friedrich (Fritz) Boiken Frerichs (born January 4, 1882 in Heppens , † May 3, 1945, presumably in the Bay of Lübeck ) was a social democratic politician .

Live and act

Friedrich (Fritz) Frerichs was the son of the worker Friedrich Frerichs (1838–1882) and his wife Grethe Maria geb. Dirks from Heppens . After attending primary school there, he learned the trade of carpenter in Varel and in 1903 became a member of the German Woodworkers' Association , a forerunner of the free trade unions , and in 1906 of the SPD. He worked in the profession he had learned until 1919. In addition, he was temporarily active as a union employment agent. Until 1906 Frerich was a board member of the branch of the woodworkers' association in Rüstringen - Wilhelmshaven , where he worked from 1903 to 1908 after years of wandering in Westphalia . From 1907 he held the same position in the Emden branch , then from 1911 to 1915 in Stuttgart and then again in Rüstringen-Wilhelmshaven. Frerichs took part in the First World War as a simple soldier from 1916 to 1918.

After the November Revolution of 1918/19, which brought the SPD a strong increase in members, Frerichs became the full-time local secretary of the SPD in Rüstringen / Wilhelmshaven. From 1920 to 1933 he belonged to the state parliament of Oldenburg , since 1921 Frerichs was chairman of the SPD parliamentary group. During this time he decisively determined the politics of the party in Oldenburg and was regarded as a respected and balanced representative and expert in the field of financial policy and financial equalization. He also represented his party in the city council of Rüstringen as an unpaid councilor (1920–1933). He volunteered in the labor administration, from 1923 to 1927 as chairman of the labor office of the Jade cities, 1925 as managing director of the state labor office in Oldenburg and from 1922 to 1925 member of the Oldenburg finance court. On October 1, 1929, he became a full-time party secretary in the SPD district of Oldenburg-Ostfriesland-Osnabrück and as such was particularly responsible for local and social policy. He was also the chairman of the SPD district executive in this district.

After the National Socialists came to power and the SPD was banned on June 22, 1933, Frerichs was expelled from Wilhelmshaven and was unemployed for several years before he started working as a carpenter again in 1935. The couple Frerichs, April 15, 1922, he was with the famous SPD politician Elizabeth Frerichs married (1883-1967) lived a very secluded from the Gestapo monitored (Gestapo) in Bohlenbergerfeld in Zetel . In 1940 Frerichs was drafted to work at the Marx air base in East Frisia . In the course of the grating , in which former members of the democratic parties and opponents of the Nazi regime were arrested after the assassination attempt on Hitler , the Gestapo picked Frerichs up on August 22, 1944 and delivered him to the Neuengamme concentration camp . His wife Elisabeth lodged a complaint with the Reich Security Main Office in vain , but the application was rejected on October 20, 1944. On March 25, 1945, his wife received the last sign of life from the prisoner Frerichs with the number 43023 in Block 27, who shared the imprisonment with the later SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher .

The end of Frerichs has not yet been clarified. It is uncertain whether he was murdered in Hamburg in the last days before the liberation at the end of April 1945 or was one of the victims of the sinking of the prisoner ship Cap Arcona on May 3, 1945 in the Bay of Lübeck. It is also possible, according to his wife, that he was murdered on the march to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the Lüneburg Heath .

Appreciation

Frerichs was a staunch democrat who, in the last years of the Weimar Republic, opposed the emergence of National Socialism as well as the policies of the KPD .

In 1946, the municipality of Zetel renamed the street where the Frerich couple last lived as Fritz-Frerichs-Straße . Further Fritz-Frerichs-Strasse exist in Wilhelmshaven and in Sande .

See also

• The victims of National Socialism among the parliamentarians from Lower Saxony areas

literature

• Social Democratic Party of Germany (ed.): Committed to freedom. Memorial book of the German social democracy in the 20th century. Marburg 2000, ISBN 3-89472-173-1 , p. 102f.
• Albrecht Eckhardt: From the bourgeois revolution to the National Socialist takeover of power - the Oldenburg state parliament and its representatives 1848-1933. Isensee, Oldenburg 1996, ISBN 3-89598-327-6 , p. 94.
• Frerichs, Friedrich (Fritz) Boiken In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg . Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , pp. 208-209 ( online ).

Web links

• Biography of Friedrich Frerichs . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)