Fritz Rau (resistance fighter)

Fritz Rau (born May 12, 1904 in Stuttgart , † December 20, 1933 in Berlin ) was a communist journalist and resistance fighter during the Nazi era .

Life

Rau, who came from a working-class family, first learned the book printing trade and eventually joined the Association of German Book Printers . This was soon followed by membership in the Communist Youth of Germany (KJD) .

He was arrested during a youth demonstration in the fall of 1923 and sentenced to one year in prison as a result. After he worked for a while as an editor at the Süddeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , he was appointed to the central committee of the KJVD in Berlin, where he became editor of the newspaper Die Junge Garde , published by the KJVD . He also worked as a teacher at the organization's schools. At international events of the communist youth movement , he appeared as a speaker in Paris , Saint-Etienne and in 1928 at the meeting of the World Youth League in the Netherlands . In August 1928 he was a participant in a delegation that went to the 5th World Congress of the Communist Youth International (KJI), a section of the Comintern . He was elected to the organization's executive committee and therefore stayed in Moscow for about a year . After this time he worked again as an editor at the Süddeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung in Stuttgart and worked as agitprop secretary of the KPD district leadership, who was also responsible for cultural policy; For example, Friedrich Wolf brought him in in 1932 to work on the agitprop piece How are the fronts . In 1932 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the district organ of the KPD class struggle in Halle . He was also a member of the KPD district leadership in Halle- Merseburg .

As a result of the Nazi takeover in Germany, the KPD was banned. Rau went underground , where he first worked illegally in Halle and later in Berlin as a functionary of the KPD's district leadership. But in September 1933 he fell into the hands of the Gestapo and was killed a short time later during an interrogation in his prison cell in Berlin-Moabit .

His grave is in the cemetery in Stuttgart-Heslach .

Trivia

Fritz Rau was engaged to Gertrud Mink , who lived with him temporarily in the underground and visited him in prison after his arrest. Shortly before his arrest, Rau hid with the resistance fighter Liselotte Herrmann , who became pregnant by him. In 1934 their son Walter Herrmann (1934–2013) was born, who grew up with his grandparents and never met his father. It was not until 1991, at the age of 57, after the death of Fritz Rau's fiancé, who later became a city councilor in Stuttgart under the name of Gertrud Frühschütz, that Walter Herrmann found out about his father's name from a historian researching the archives at the time. His mother had only revealed the name to her lawyer shortly before her execution.

literature

• German resistance fighters 1933–1945 . Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1970.
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Walther Pollatschek: Friedrich Wolf. A biography. Berlin and Weimar 1963, p. 167 ff .
2. ↑ Ulrike Puvogel: Memorials for the Victims of National Socialism . Ed .: Federal Agency for Political Education . 1995, p. 90 .
3. ↑ VVN-BdA Baden-Württemberg (ed.): Lilo Herrmann - a Stuttgart resistance fighter . Stuttgart 1993, p. 69 ff . (2nd edition, edited by Lothar Letsche).