Gertrud Lutz

Gertrud Lutz with daughter in 1942

Gertrud Lutz , née Schlotterbeck, called Trude (born September 17, 1910 in Reutlingen ; † November 30, 1944 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a German resistance fighter .

Life

Gertrud was the daughter of the metalworker Gotthilf Schlotterbeck and his wife Maria. After completing her commercial training, she was initially unemployed. She became a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) and joined the KPD in 1931 . At that time she was working as an office clerk at a Stuttgart publishing house that published communist writings.

The first arrest and pre-trial detention took place in 1932 on suspicion of communist disintegration ; on February 4, 1933, the proceedings were discontinued on the basis of the impunity law of December 20, 1932 (amnesty). In spring 1933 she fled Stuttgart and looked for work underground. On October 24, 1933, she was arrested again on suspicion of "disseminating communist decomposition writings"; on September 7, 1934, she was sentenced to 2 years and 4 months for preparation for high treason . From September 1934 to April 21, 1936 she was imprisoned in the Gotteszell women's concentration camp near Schwäbisch Gmünd . Instead of being released, he was then transferred directly to the Moringen women's concentration camp as a protective prisoner .

After her release on December 7, 1936, Gertrud lived again in Luginsland , Annastr. 6 then in Stuttgart-Degerloch (Auf dem Haigst 6) and worked as a stenographer until March 1939. In 1938 she married the forest assessor Walter Lutz (born January 13, 1906). In September 1939 at the beginning of the war, Gertrud was "arrested as a preventative measure" but was released after a short time. Her husband Walter Lutz was drafted in early 1942. Their daughter Wilfriede Sonnhilde was born on August 2, 1942. Shouting “Will-Friedense” to a child in the middle of a war suggests the mother's courage. Walter Lutz fell in Russia on October 2, 1942 , he had never seen his daughter.

Since her brother Friedrich Schlotterbeck was released from the Welzheim concentration camp on August 28, 1943 , the entire Schlotterbeck family worked actively against the Nazi regime in the Luginsland district of Stuttgart-Untertürkheim . In January 1944 Gertrud moved to Grabenstetten on the Swabian Alb to the family of the farmer and master baker Gustav Keller to protect herself and her child from the increasing number of bomb attacks. In May 1944 her brother Friedrich learned that the Schlotterbeck resistance group had been betrayed to the Gestapo by Eugen Nesper .

On separate paths tried Friedrich, his brother Hermann, his bride Else Himmelheber and Karl Stäbler to Switzerland to escape. Friedrich Schlotterbeck was the only one who managed to escape. Gertrud thought she was safe, but was arrested on June 10, 1944, together with her parents and daughter, as part of their kinship detention. Her daughter - not yet two years old - first came to an NSV children's home in Waiblingen . From prison, Gertrud organized that the Gustav Keller family would take care of the child and bring them to Grabenstetten.

The Stolperstein, laid in Stuttgart-Degerloch in front of the house at Auf dem Haigst 6

Further arrests in the course of clan imprisonment from the Freundeskreis took place in Stuttgart in early June. Erich Heinser, Emil Gärtner, Sofie Klenk, Emi Seitz and Hermann Seitz and Frieda Schwille from Pfullingen were arrested. Else Himmelträger, Friedrich Schlotterbeck's bride, initially managed to hide from the Gestapo, but she, too, was caught and imprisoned. Like the other members of the Schlotterbeck group, she was interrogated for months and presumably also tortured without giving any information about her connections and her underground activities. On November 27, 1944, Gertrud Lutz, Else Himmelheber and Schlotterbeck's parents were transported from Stuttgart to the Dachau concentration camp and murdered there on November 30, 1944 without a trial. Her brother Hermann Schlotterbeck was only arrested in October 1944 and tortured for months in the Welzheim concentration camp. While retreating from the French, the inmates of the Welzheim concentration camp were taken to Upper Swabia, and on April 19, 1945, Hermann Schlotterbeck was shot by SS man Albert Rentschler in a forest near Riedlingen near the Danube. Friedrich Schlotterbeck and his wife Anna took care of his sister's child.

Honors

1948 Grave of honor at the Stuttgart-Untertürkheim cemetery for the Schlotterbeck resistance group.
A street in Leipzig was named after her in 1950.
The GDR children's home in Freist near Eisleben was called Gertrud Lutz.
On October 5th, 2009, a stumbling block was laid in front of the house in Stuttgart-Degerloch Auf dem Haigst 6 in memory of Gertrud Lutz .

literature

Günter Randecker, Michael Horlacher (ed.): »My God, Grabenstetten is like a little paradise in my memory« - »100 years of Gertrud Lutz, geb. Schlotterbeck «, letters, documents, pictures. Stuttgart 2010
Friedrich Schlotterbeck: executed for preparation for high treason ... Verlag Die Zukunft, Reutlingen 1947
Friedrich Schlotterbeck: The darker the night ... memories of a German worker 1933-1945. Gabriele Walter Verlag, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-925440-10-0
Julius Schätzle: Stations to Hell - Concentration Camps in Baden and Württemberg 1933-1945. Röderberg-Verlag, Frankfurt 1974, ISBN 3-87682-035-9
Jutta von Freyberg, Ursula Krause-Schmitt: Moringen, Lichtenburg, Ravensbrück Women in Concentration Camps 1933–1945. Publishing house for academic writings, ISBN 3-88864-215-9

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Lutz, Gertrud
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Lutz, Trude; Schlotterbeck, Gertrud (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH	September 17, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH	Reutlingen
DATE OF DEATH	November 30, 1944
Place of death	Dachau concentration camp