Fritz Siedentopf

Portrait of Siedentopf

Memorial stele in front of the former Auert company

Fritz Siedentopf (born April 14, 1908 in Güsten ; † August 28, 1944 in Brandenburg-Görden ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Siedentopf learned the trade of a locksmith . After the death of his parents, he moved to Berlin in the early 1930s . In 1932 Siedentopf joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, Siedentopf took part in the KPD's resistance struggle. He was hired by his party to illegally produce small-format leaflets, pamphlets, newspapers and other material. For this purpose he lived illegally under the code name "Krüger" with the master tailor Emma Beyer, who was also active in the resistance, in Berlin-Tempelhof , where the material was manufactured and stored. On August 18, 1934, Siedentopf was arrested together with Emma Beyer and taken to the police headquarters on Alexanderplatz . He spent his pre-trial detention in the Berlin-Charlottenburg prison and was then imprisoned in the Lichtenstein concentration camp until the start of the trial. On December 13, 1934, he was sentenced to four years in prison by the Berlin Higher Regional Court for “preparing for high treason ” . He served his sentence in the Luckau and Brandenburg-Görden penitentiaries as well as in the Dessau / Roßlau camp, in Torgau and on the Piesteritz prisoners' house.

On December 22, 1938, Siedentopf was released from prison. He found work as a steel construction fitter at Erwin Auert in Berlin-Weißensee . From 1939 on, Siedentopf had contact with the communist resistance fighters Robert Uhrig and Franz Mett , whom he knew from his imprisonment in Luckau. Siedentopf became an instructor for the Uhrig Group and supported Mett in instructing resistance groups in companies, including at Knorr-Bremse AG in Lichtenberg and Bamag-Meguin AG in Moabit . Siedentopf founded a resistance group near Auert in Weißensee, where he worked. He produced sabotage instructions for all these companies and the AEG turbine plant . On February 4, 1942, Siedentopf was arrested again and held in the basement of the Gestapo building on Burgstrasse, in the Alexanderplatz police headquarters and then in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . From August 1943 he was in custody in Berlin-Plötzensee. From September to mid-November 1943 he was employed in Landsberg an der Warthe . He was then imprisoned again in Berlin-Plötzensee. Siedentopf was indicted on February 15, 1944 and sentenced to death on July 6, 1944 by the People's Court in Potsdam for “preparing for high treason under aggravating circumstances and favoring the enemy in war”.

On August 28, 1944 Siedentopf was in the penitentiary Brandenburg-Gorden with the guillotine murdered.

Honors

Stumbling stone in front of Siedentopf's former home

• A memorial stele in Berlin-Weißensee (Liebermannstrasse 30, former Auert-Werke) and a stumbling block in Willibald-Alexis-Strasse 15 (former residential building) remind of Fritz Siedentopf.

literature

• Luise Kraushaar : German resistance fighters 1933-1945. Biographies and letters . Volume 2. Dietz, Berlin 1970, pp. 274-276.
• Luise Kraushaar: Berlin communists in the fight against fascism 1936 to 1942. Robert Uhrig and comrades . Dietz, Berlin 1981, passim.
• Hanne Job (epilogue): Fight for the human right. Life pictures and last letters from anti-fascist resistance fighters . 1st edition, unchanged reprint. Verlag Neuer Weg, Düsseldorf 1988, ISBN 3-88021-180-9 , p. 468.
• Hans-Rainer Sandvoss : The “other” capital of the Reich: Resistance from the workers' movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 . Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-936872-94-1 , pp. 261 and 573.

Web links

• Fritz Siedentopf (Kreuzberg memorial plaque for victims of the Nazi regime 1933–1945).
• Burkhard Hawemann, Wilfried Burkard: Fritz Siedentopf (Stolpersteine ​​Berlin).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Helmut Roewer: The Red Orchestra and other secret service myths. Espionage between Germany and Russia in World War II, 1941–1945 . Ares, Graz 2010, p. 168.