Gertrud Koch (resistance fighter)

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Gertrud Koch in the Friedenspark at the Edelweiss Pirate Festival in Cologne on June 28, 2009

Gertrud Koch (born June 1, 1924 in Cologne ; † June 21, 2016 ) resisted National Socialism in a group of the Cologne Edelweiss pirates during the Second World War .

Life

Gertrud (called "Mucki") Koch, b. Kühlem, was born in Cologne as the daughter of a boilermaker and a pharmacist. Her father was a communist ; he died in the Esterwegen concentration camp . Before the DC circuit of the youth organizations in the Hitler Youth was a member of the Red Young Pioneers . Gertrud Koch refused to join the Association of German Girls and, with friends from Cologne and Düsseldorf, founded an informal group after the Red Young Pioneers had been banned, which can be attributed to the proximity of the edelweiss pirates and which became increasingly politicized as events progressed.

At this time, further groups of edelweiss pirates formed in Cologne. Some people in this environment went underground with Hans Steinbrück in 1944 . While the older, so-called “ Navajos ” from Cologne's southern part of the city attacked HJ strips and the Ehrenfeld group also fought against the regime with militant actions, the group around Gertrud Koch created and displayed leaflets and wrote slogans on house walls and railroad cars. At the beginning of their leaflet campaigns in the summer of 1942, a text by the Edelweiss Group read as follows:

"Finally put an end to the brown horde! We perish in this misery. This world is no longer our world "

The most spectacular action was a "rain of leaflets" from the dome of Cologne Central Station . As a result, friends and acquaintances were arrested and taken to the notorious EL-DE house , where the Gestapo was based. Gertrud Koch was - like some others - taken to prison in Brauweiler . Other members of the group came to the front in penal companies. Koch suffered the torture and beatings of the Gestapo officials , including Josef Hoegen , was in solitary confinement for two months and was only able to escape from custody in the Brauweiler Abbey by accident . She became a witness when 13 young people from the Ehrenfeld group were publicly hanged in Ehrenfeld. Günther Schwarz was the youngest at sixteen. Together with her mother, Koch escaped from Cologne and lived on a mountain farm in the Allgäu for two years until the end of the war .

After the war

After the Second World War, Gertrud Koch became involved in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) . Later she worked in drug help, she lived in Cologne.

In 2005 she was one of the co-founders of the Edelweißpiratenfestival in Cologne , which has been remembering the music of the politically resistant youth of the Nazi era every year since then.

The edelweiss pirates Gertrud Koch, Jean Jülich and Peter Schäfer worked to prevent the events of the National Socialist era from being forgotten with various publications, lectures and campaigns. In May 2007, the Rhineland Regional Association awarded all three of them the Rhineland Taler.

In 2008 she was honored together with the Cologne edelweiss pirates Jean Jülich , Wolfgang Schwarz and Fritz Theilen in Düsseldorf with the Heine bust, which is awarded by the Düsseldorf “Friends of Heinrich Heine ”. This honored her extraordinary activity in the sense of the critical and resistant spirit of the important poet. After Jean Jülich had already received the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon in 1991 , the remaining five surviving members of the Cologne resistance groups were also awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon in April 2011 , not least because of Jürgen Roters' long-term efforts .

Koch was cremated on June 28, 2016 in Cologne's Westfriedhof .

At the beginning of 2019, the city of Troisdorf's second comprehensive school was named “Gertrud Koch Comprehensive School” in her honor.

plant

  • Gertrud Koch, Regina Carstensen: Edelweiss. My youth as a resistance fighter. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-499-62093-5 (autobiography - written down by Regina Carstensen, original edition as rororo 62093, paperback).

literature

  • Simone Dittmar: "We want to be free from Hitler": Youth resistance in the Third Reich using the example of three Cologne edelweiss pirates (= European university publications . Series 3 History and its auxiliary sciences , Volume 1088). Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / Bruxelles / New York NY / Oxford / Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-61473-0 .

Web links

Commons : Gertrud Koch (Edelweißpiraten)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary for Gertrud Koch
  2. ^ Subject dictionary of the history of Germany and the German workers' movement . Volume 1 [of 2], A-K . Dietz, Berlin 1969, DNB 457999586
  3. ↑ Red Young Pioneers , a youth organization of the KPD , founded in 1919/1920 as the Young Spartacus Association for children between ten and fourteen years of age. She fought against the exploitation of children and reactionary school policies in the Weimar Republic . Young Spartakus was its press organ until 1926, and from March 1927 the drum . In 1927 it had around 7,000 members, and in 1932 it had around 56,000
  4. ↑ Website of the Edelweiss Pirate Festival
  5. ↑ Rolly Brings and the Edelweiss Pirates receive Rhineland thalers. ( Memento from August 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) On lvr.de, the website of the Rhineland Regional Council.
  6. ^ Mattias Pesch: Edelweisspiraten "Role models of civil courage" . In: Kölner Stadtanzeiger , April 14, 2011, p. 26; accessed on June 23, 2016
  7. ↑ Solemn naming. In: Website of the Gertrud Koch Comprehensive School. July 13, 2019, accessed May 13, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Koch, Gertrud
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kühlem, Gertrud (maiden name); Mucki (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 2016