Fritz Lewerentz

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Friedrich "Fritz" Lewerentz (born July 3, 1878 in Loddin ; † April 1945 ) was a German politician ( SPD ).

Life

Fritz Lewerentz was born the son of a fisherman. He attended elementary school from 1885 to 1893 and completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter from 1894, which he finished in 1897 with the journeyman's examination. He then traveled to Central, North and West Germany as a journeyman, before he was drafted into military service in 1898. After his discharge from the army he worked as a carpenter in Krefeld until 1907 . He joined the carpenters' association , was a board member of its Krefeld branch from 1900 to 1907 and chairman of the local union cartel from 1906 to 1907, for which he served as a full-time secretary from April 1907 to November 1911. Around 1914 he was a partner in the Niederrheinische Volkstribüne and a member of the supervisory board of the Krefeld consumer association . From August 5, 1914 to November 25, 1918, he took part in the First World War as a soldier and was deployed on the Western Front.

Lewerentz had joined the SPD, was District Secretary of the Social Democrats for the Left Lower Rhine from December 1911 to 1933 and chairman of the SPD Krefeld from 1927 to 1933. He had been a city ​​councilor in Krefeld since 1918 and was sent as a delegate to the Berlin Reichsrätekongress in April 1919 . During the Belgian occupation of his hometown in 1923/24 he was expelled for political reasons. From 1919 to 1921 he was a member of the Prussian State Constitutional Assembly . He was then elected to the Prussian state parliament, to which he belonged until 1933. In 1927 Lewerentz acquired an old mill with a large plot of land in Stenden on the Lower Rhine, on which he built a young workers' holiday and education center in 1928 . During the Nazi era it was expropriated by the National Socialists and used as a Gauleiter school.

After the “seizure of power” by the National Socialists , Lewerentz called for mass protests on February 5, 1933. After the renewed election to the Krefeld city parliament in March 1933, he refused to take part in the constituent session in opposition to the Nazi interference with the democratic institution.

Because of his resistance, Lewerentz was persecuted by the National Socialists. After the SPD was banned in June 1933, he had to go into hiding. In the spring of 1934 he was imprisoned in Krefeld for two weeks. On August 22, 1944, he was arrested in the course of the grating action without a specific reason and imprisoned in the prison in Anrath . From there he was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in September 1944 . Lewerentz died in April 1945 shortly before the liberation during the evacuation of the concentration camp on the so-called death march from Sachsenhausen .

Honors

Stumbling block for Friedrich Lewerentz, Hammerschmitdtplatz 1, Krefeld .

In 1952, the workers' youth training facility in Stenden was reopened. In 1972, she was in the Heimvolkshochschule converted "Fritz Lewerentz home". In 1993 the education department was renamed “Bildungswerk Stenden”. The guest house remained under the name "Fritz-Lewerentz-Heim" and was modernized in 1996 to a conference hotel.

In downtown Krefeld, "Lewerentzstraße" is named after the politician.

In 2005, on the initiative of Krefeld students - among other things - a stumbling block was to be laid for Lewerentz to honor the Nazi victim. Unlike in other cities, the Jewish community in Krefeld spoke out against the memorial stones on the grounds that the names of the victims would be constantly trampled upon by being embedded in the ground. The Krefeld city council majority made up of CDU and FDP then rejected the initiative in principle, although a number of the Nazi victims to be honored were not Jewish, including Lewerentz. Then the students initiated a successful with around 14,000 signatures citizen initiatives . A compromise was found between those involved: if the respective homeowners and the relatives of the victims agree, the stumbling blocks can be moved. On December 17, 2006, the Stolperstein was laid in front of House Hammerschmidtplatz 1 in the presence of Lewerentz's great-granddaughter Karin Munse.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Die Geheime Staatspolizei in Krefeld ( Memento of the original from October 8, 2007 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. (PDF; 99 kB) by Ingrid Schupetta, in: Die Heimat , year 76/2005  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.heimat-krefeld.de
  2. ↑ Project documentation for the students
  3. ↑ First stumbling blocks in memory of Nazi victims , Rheinische Post , December 19, 2006
  4. ^ Controversial stones have been relocated ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Westdeutsche Zeitung , March 4, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Lewerentz, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lewerentz, Friedrich (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD), MdL
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Loddin
DATE OF DEATH April 1945