Friedrich Schlotterbeck

This article deals with the writer, for the chemist see Fritz Schlotterbeck

Friedrich Schlotterbeck around 1930

Albert Friedrich (called Frieder ) Schlotterbeck (born January 6, 1909 in Reutlingen , † April 7, 1979 in Berlin-Buch ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism and a writer .

Life

Frieder was the son of the metalworker Gotthilf Schlotterbeck and his wife Maria; he learned to be a carpenter and became unemployed after completing his training. From 1923 he was a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD). In 1928 he joined the KPD. 1929/30 attended the KJ school in Moscow and Pushkino. August 1932 to July 1933 in various functions of the KJI in Sweden, Denmark after a visit to report in Moscow, he returned to Germany in July 1933 and was employed as youth district manager in Saxony. On December 1, 1933, he was arrested in Chemnitz and sentenced to three years in prison on October 5, 1934. First he was sent to the Waldheim penitentiary , where many people were imprisoned for political reasons from 1933. There he met Helmut Holtzhauer , with whom he had a lifelong friendship. After his release from prison he was taken into " protective custody " on May 5, 1937 , which he spent in the Welzheim protective custody camp.

With his release from the Welzheim concentration camp on August 28, 1943 , the Gestapo combined the goal of using him as a lure to track down anti-state activities. Schlotterbeck managed to fool the Gestapo, according to the statement of the “supervising” commissioner Junginger. After the surprising appearance of parachutists Eugen Nesper Schlotterbeck worked with all his family and his bride Else Himmelheber in the district Luginsland in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim active against the Nazi regime. In June 1944, Else Himmelheber and Friedrich Schlotterbeck wanted to get married. A week before the scheduled date, it emerged that Nesper was working as an informant for the Gestapo and had betrayed the group to them. The inner circle of the group (Herman Schlotterbeck, Eugen Nesper, Else Himmelträger, Karl Stäbler and Friedrich Schlotterbeck) decided to escape to Switzerland on separate routes . Schlotterbeck was the only one who managed to escape; on June 4, 1944, he managed to cross the border in the Weisweil / Klettgau area.

On June 10, 1944, the parents Maria and Gotthilf Schlotterbeck were arrested with their daughter Gertrud Lutz . In the days that followed, the Gestapo arrested anyone who had contact with Eugen Nesper. Emil Gärtner (a work colleague of Herman Schlotterbeck), Erich Heinser, Sophie Klenk, Herman and Emmy Seitz were arrested. Else Himmelträger was arrested after a failed escape in a train on the way to the Alps. Theodor Seit, Emmy Seitz's husband, was tried as a soldier before a court martial and sentenced to death. In the Stuttgart Gestapo headquarters Hotel Silber , the detainees were interrogated for months and probably also tortured without giving any information about their connections and their underground activities. On November 27, 1944, they were transported from Stuttgart to Dachau and shot there on November 30, 1944 without a trial by order of the Reich Security Main Office. His brother Hermann Schlotterbeck was arrested on September 16, 1944 after he had been in hiding for weeks; a spy had denounced him. After months of imprisonment and torture in the Welzheim concentration camp (Gestapo prison), the Welzheim concentration camp was evacuated in trucks in the direction of the Alps. Herman Schlotterbeck was shot dead on April 19, 1945 in a forest near Riedlingen by the SS and Gestapo man Albert Rentschler on the orders of the head of the officially disbanded State Police Headquarters in Stuttgart , Friedrich Mußgay . Only Karl Stäbler, who suffered a bullet in the thigh while attempting to escape at the Swiss border, managed to drive back to Stuttgart and - hidden by friends in a garden house - survive the end of the war without being discovered by the Gestapo.

After his successful escape in Switzerland, Frieder Schlotterbeck met his former childhood friend Anna Leibbrand , née Wiedmann (1902–1972). In 1924 she had married the KPD politician Robert Leibbrand , by whom she had a son, and had a second marriage with the Swiss doctor Hans von Fischer. In 1937, Fischer founded the CSS Centrale Sanitaire Suisse, an aid organization. After contacting the Swiss party organization, Schlotterbeck was expelled from the party because of his "agreement with the Gestapo". As a kind of "educational measure", he was commissioned to write down his experiences and summarized his memories of the time of National Socialism in the book The darker the night, the brighter the stars shine together, which appeared in 1945 and quickly made the author known. In June 1945 Schlotterbeck returned to Stuttgart and only found out about the fate of his family and friends there. He published a brief account of this in the brochure in 1945 ... executed for preparation for high treason .

Shortly after his return, he became chairman of the Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (VVN) in Württemberg, was active as President ("Head") of the German Red Cross in what was then the state of Württemberg-Baden and was also a member of the KPD state leadership. Shortly after the liberation from fascism, the Centrale Sanitaire Suisse (CSS) founded the South German Medical and Medical Aid (SÄS) in Stuttgart with Schlotterbeck and his friend Robert Welsch. Schlotterbeck requisitioned rest homes for former concentration camp inmates a. a. in the Harprechthaus near Schopfloch (Lenningen) ; he received significant support from CSS. Schlotterbeck took in Wilfriede Lutz, the daughter of his sister Gertrud, who was taken from her mother when she was arrested at the age of two.

Together with his future wife Anna von Fischer (formerly Anna Leibbrand ) he moved to the Soviet occupation zone on the initiative of Helmut Holtzhauer in April 1948 , after he was faced with increasing difficulties in Stuttgart due to his communist sentiments. a. Under pressure from the American military administration, the presidency of the Red Cross was withdrawn from him because he had spoken out against participating in the Berlin Airlift. Friedrich Schlotterbeck became city councilor for public education in Dresden . So he came into contact with artists like Martin Hellberg , who appreciated his straightforward manner, which resulted in a long-term friendship between the two. His direct way was to him in the GDR a . a. to doom. In February 1951, after an intervention by the then very active State Party Control Commission for Saxony, Schlotterbeck and his wife were temporarily excluded from the state's ruling SED (party) on suspicion of "espionage". As members of the SED , the couple came into the sights of the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK) and the newly founded Ministry for State Security when investigating Western emigrants . Schlotterbeck was accused of being a Gestapo informant , and he and his wife were also accused of having contacts with Noel Field and Herta Jurr-Tempi in Switzerland. The ZPKK ordered the crushing of his book The darker the night, the brighter the stars . They were asked to demonstrate their loyalty to the state by doing excellent work in the infamous uranium mines nearby. Schlotterbeck also lost his office as a city councilor and went to the Ore Mountains as a miner for SDAG Wismut in mid-April 1951 .

Grave of Anna and Friedrich Schlotterbeck

On February 15, 1953, he and his wife - they had married in 1951 - were arrested and held for over a year in the Volkshaus in Chemnitz. On April 27, 1954, he was arrested by the first criminal division of the Rostock District Court for “crimes under Article 6 of the GDR Sentenced to six years in prison in connection with an offense against Control Council Directive 38 "and for" criminal relations with American agent Noel H. Field ". The sentence was reduced to three years in prison in 1954.

Both were released on February 15, 1956 after exactly three years in prison. This was followed by a non-public “rehabilitation” (deletion of criminal records) and re-admission to the SED.

Friedrich and Anna Schlotterbeck then lived in Groß Glienicke (Potsdam district) and worked as writers and radio play authors. Together they wrote u. a. Ms. Viktoria's memoirs (1962). They were close friends with the writer Christa Wolf and her husband Gerhard. Among the best-known works by Schlotterbeck are Im Rosengarten von Sanscoussi (1968), a polemical accounting for Prussian history. In 1969 Schlotterbeck gave a speech in his old home in Untertürkheim on the occasion of the 25th memorial service in honor of the resistance group. Friedrich Schlotterbeck died in Groß Glienicke on April 7, 1979 after a heart attack with a subsequent stay at the Berlin-Buch Clinic . The funeral and burial took place in Groß Glienicke, Christa Wolf gave the funeral speech.

literature

• Friedrich Schlotterbeck: ... executed for preparation for high treason. Europe, Stuttgart-Degerloch 1945. PDF , [ http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00002570 PDF].
• Friedrich Schlotterbeck: The darker the night, the brighter the stars. Europe, Zurich 1945; Walter, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-925440-10-0 .
• Friedrich Schlotterbeck: The darker the night ... Memories of a German worker 1933-1945. Butterfly Verlag, Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 3-89657-172-9 .
• Anna Josephine Fischer: Behind the seven mountains. Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1945.
• Anna Schlotterbeck: The Forbidden Hope. From the life of a communist. Facta Oblita, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-926827-31-9 .
• Julius Schätzle: Stations to Hell. Concentration camps in Baden and Württemberg 1933–1945. Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-87682-035-9 .
• Günter Randecker, Michael Horlacher (ed.): “My God, Grabenstetten is like a little paradise in my memory” - “100 years of Gertrud Lutz, geb. Schlotterbeck. “ Letters, documents, pictures. Stuttgart 2010.
• Martin Hellberg : In the vortex of truth. Memoirs of a Theater Man (1933–1951). Henschel, Berlin 1978.
• Martin Hellberg: With a sharp look. Memories of a Filmmaker (1951–1981) . Henschel, Berlin 1982
• Christa Wolf : One day a year. 1960-2000. Luchterhand, Munich 2003; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-46007-8 .
• Schlotterbeck, Friedrich . 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 .
• Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 3-89657-138-9 .

Radio plays

• 1958: With Anna Schlotterbeck: SMS Prinzregent Luitpold - Director: Theodor Popp (Broadcasting of the GDR)
• 1959: With Anna Schlotterbeck: Stormy Days - Director: Helmut Hellstorff (Broadcasting of the GDR)

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Schlotterbeck in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Schlotterbeck resistance group from Luginsland (accessed June 16, 2015)
• Short biography and information on the work of Friedrich Schlotterbeck at Literaturport
• Virtual historical site Hotel Silber Presentation of the history of the Schlotterbeck group, Eugen Nesper and the Gestapo
• Sigrid Brüggemann, execution in Dachau

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Spruchkammer I, Stuttgart, decision to discontinue Friedrich Schlotterbeck, in: BStU, MfS, AU 309/54, vol. 8, p. 91f.
2. ^ Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): Die Geheime Staatspolizei in Württemberg and Hohenzollern, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 3-89657-138-9 , pp. 409f.
3. ^ LG Ravensburg, May 21, 1948 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. II, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1969, No. 59, pp. 519-535 shooting of 3 Gestapo prisoners on the orders of the Reich Main Security Office for 'treasonous behavior' ( memento of the original from July 23, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.