Fritz Meinhardt

Fritz Aron Meinhardt (born February 16, 1899 in Schwedt / Oder ; † April 23, 1943 in Dresden ) was a German worker functionary , communist and anti-fascist resistance fighter of Jewish descent.

family

Fritz Meinhardt was part of the extensive Jewish Meinhardt family. Most of the members of this family in Vierraden and Schwedt were tobacco plantation owners and tobacco traders. A well-known member of the family was the lawyer and industrialist Wilhelm Meinhardt (1872–1955), founder and from 1919 director of the OSRAM light bulb company . Fritz Meinhardt was the son of the horse dealer Max Meinhardt (1853–1920) and his wife Rosa Meinhardt b. Wollstein († 1936). From 1927 he was with Marta Meinhardt, geb. Franz, married. Together they both had a son (1941–1944) who fell victim to an epidemic at the age of three.

Live and act

Fritz Meinhardt attended high school in Schwedt until he was 16 and volunteered for the First World War . During the war Meinhardt sustained a serious head injury, had to undergo an operation and was given an artificial skull plate. After the war he went first to Guben and later to Danzig , where he worked as a bank clerk. Meinhardt took part in the political life of the emerging right-wing militarist movement until about 1923, believing that this was the way for the working people out of the post-war hardship. His sense of justice was said to have turned to left-wing forces after the Kapp Putsch .

In 1924 Meinhardt moved to Dresden, where he continued to work as a bank clerk, and in 1927 he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In the KPD he met his future brother-in-law, the printer and worker functionary Erich Riehle, who was able to win him over to the anti-fascist struggle against the emerging National Socialist movement. In 1929 Fritz Meinhardt became a member of the local group of the KPD Dresden- Lockwitz - Nickern , where he took over the function of the main cashier. Meinhardt lost his job in the global economic crisis and the associated closure of many banks in 1931.

After the National Socialists came to power , Meinhardt was arrested in April 1933 and taken to the Königstein-Halbestadt concentration camp. He was interrogated several times there, but was briefly released. He was arrested again that same year. After weeks of interrogation and sometimes mistreatment in several remand prisons, Meinhardt was released four months later, as no high treason could be proven personally . After his release, Fritz Meinhardt contacted the KPD again and was politically illegal, including distributing illegal newspapers and leaflets. Because of his Jewish descent, Fritz Meinhardt was fired from his company in 1939 and expelled from his apartment in Nickern in the same year. In addition, he had to use the name Israel as his middle name in accordance with the name change regulation . He performed forced labor at the Goehle factory and the Dresden tea factory in Dresden- Striesen , where he met Victor Klemperer .

On April 21, 1943, Fritz Meinhardt was denounced by a worker in his company , imprisoned by the Gestapo and tortured. The reason for the denunciation was a negative statement about the food served during the forced labor of Jewish citizens on April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler . After two days in solitary confinement in the Dresden police prison, he was "found dead in his cell", according to the police report that was handed over to his relatives. In the central database of Holocaust victims, suicide is given as the cause of death. On May 2, 1943, Meinhardt's urn was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Dresden. Later she was transferred to an unknown cemetery.

The local group Dresden- Niedersedlitz- Lockwitz-Nickern of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN) used the name "Fritz Meinhardt" after the Second World War , so that his name was "a warning and obligation to work and work for peace and democracy". After 1947, the former Büttigstrasse at his place of residence, a main street in the Nickern district of Dresden, was renamed Fritz-Meinhardt-Strasse in his honor .

On April 26, 2006, a “memorial” was unveiled in front of the Dresden police headquarters, commemorating the killing of Heinrich Conradi , Fritz Meinhardt and Arthur Juliusburger. A stumbling block in front of Meinhardt's house in Nickern has been a reminder of him since 2015 .

literature

• Biographical collection of the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime in the Federal Archives , files DY 55 / V 278/6/1211
• Biographical notes on Dresden streets and squares , Museum for the History of the City of Dresden, Rudolf Förster, Dresden 1976, p. 56
• Lockwitz-Nickern, Chronicle of the 700th anniversary of both districts (1288–1988) , Jürgen Schillbach, Werner Schulze & Frank Knizek, Dresden 1988, p. 17

Web links

• Fritz Meinhardt in the Stadtwiki Dresden

Individual evidence

1. ^ Brigitte Heidenhain: Jews in Schwedt, online pdf on opus.kobv.de
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Tobias Wolf: On the trail of Fritz Meinhardt . In: Saxon newspaper . September 30, 2015 ( paid online [accessed September 30, 2015]).
3. ↑ Victor Klemperer: Diaries 1943. Berlin 1999. P. 59f.
4. ^ Yad Vashem, Central Database of Holocaust Victims , entry on Fritz Meinhardt.
5. ↑ Katja Solbrig: A map of the memorials: memory. In future, information boards will point out places associated with Jewish history in the city. In: Sächsische Zeitung , April 26, 2006 ( online for a fee ).