Hans Glaser (resistance fighter)

Hans Rudolf Glaser (born August 15, 1909 in Preßburg , died in April 1945 on the Western Front ) was a German lawyer, resistance fighter against National Socialism and concentration camp prisoner .

family

Hans Glaser grew up in an upper-class family. His father worked as a lawyer, his mother as a professor of mathematics at the University of Pressburg .

Hans Glaser himself was married, later divorced and had a daughter.

Education, studies and work

Glaser's mother tongue was Hungarian . In the home also was Slovak , German and Czech spoken. During school he learned English and French , as well as Latin and ancient Greek . He graduated from high school in Great Britain .

Glaser completed his legal studies in England and Germany and at the universities in Bratislava , Berlin and Leipzig . His doctorate took place in Leipzig in 1932. He had previously taken on German citizenship .

Until 1934, Glaser was the commercial director of Bausparlloyd AG. He then took over the representation of photo articles as well as building and special purpose savings banks. From the end of 1936 he worked as the head of a parceling cooperative.

Politics and Resistance to National Socialism

As a high school student he made contact with the communist parties of Hungary and Slovakia . Georg Lukács' writings impressed him.

Glaser was a communist and a party member. From 1934 he worked as agitprop leader of the banned KPD in a district of the Berlin administrative district Schöneberg , from spring 1935 as such in the sub-district Berlin-Schöneberg, finally in this function in the KPD sub-district Berlin-Südwest. During his illegal party work, Glaser tried to persuade various resistance groups to cooperate in the Popular Front .

Concentration camp prisoner and moor university

Glaser was arrested on March 1, 1937 and on June 29, 1937 he was in custody. He was charged on October 16, 1937 and convicted by the People's Court on December 8, 1937 , on charges of preparation for high treason . The sentence was 8 years in prison with forced labor .

At the beginning of January 1940, Hans Glaser was transferred to the Emsland camp Aschendorfermoor . On the prisoner transport there, he met Fritz Erler . Together with him, Glaser built the “central camp head” in camp II into a political and intellectual center without the guards knowing about it. Glaser developed into the Spiritus Rector , who repeatedly spurred his fellow prisoners on to intellectual activity. Here he benefited from his enthusiasm and persuasiveness, as well as his extensive education and knowledge in the fields of psychology , philosophy and the natural sciences . The educational offers and the courses of the "Moor University" included languages, natural sciences, medicine, psychology, history and courses in "scientific socialism" . The inmates and students organized the smuggling of textbooks, magazines, writing materials and strings for musical instruments into the camp.

Glaser and Erler intended to unite and strengthen the prisoners, especially members of the labor movement , in their resistance to the Nazi regime. They also saw their activities as part of a comprehensive political training program for camp inmates. For this purpose and to memorize the elementary teaching content of the “Moor University”, Hans Glaser developed a five-level catechism that conveyed the teaching structure of “scientific socialism”. This catechism, which was not passed on in writing but was to be learned by heart, first dealt with the Marxist crisis theory (I), then the theories of surplus value , accumulation and concentration of capital (II), then historical materialism (III), and then the bourgeois theory Society , its relations of production, its state and its ideology (IV) and finally dialectical materialism (V).

In December 1940 Glaser and Erler were transferred to the Rodgau-Dieburg prison camp , main camp I in Dieburg . Here, too, they developed comparable training activities.

Military service and death

Glaser was later pardoned and immediately drafted into the Wehrmacht . He fell on the Western Front in the last days of the war in April 1945.

memory

In a five-part series of articles entitled The Long Hans / Picture of a Moor Soldier, Fritz Erler remembered his tall fellow prisoner whom he admired. This portrait appeared in November 1946 in the newspaper The Free Trade Union . The historian Hartmut Soell discussed Glaser in 1974/1976 as part of his habilitation thesis, which dealt with Fritz Erler's political biography. In a lexicon on the resistance in Berlin there is a short entry about Glaser, which, however, leaves out concentration camp imprisonment, military service and death.

literature

• Hartmut Soell: Fritz Erler. A political biography , volume 1 (= international library , volume 100). Dietz, Berlin et al. 1976, ISBN 3-8012-1100-2 (at the same time: Heidelberg, Universität, Habilitationsschrift, 1974), pp. 53–63 and pp. 529–532.
• Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945. A biographical encyclopedia . Edited by the history workshop of the Berlin association of former participants in the anti-fascist resistance, those persecuted by the Nazi regime and surviving dependents (BV VdN eV) under the direction of Hans-Joachim Fieber. Volume 2 [letters C to G] Caden – Gzeck (author: Klaus Keim), trafo Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89626-352-8 , p. 259.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 57.
2. ↑ For the origin see Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 530, note 240.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime 1933 to 1945 , Vol. 2, p. 259.
4. ^ Fritz Erler: The long Hans. Image of a bog soldier (five parts). In: The Free Trade Union (Berlin), November 7, 1946-12. November 1946, here third sequel.
5. ↑ For language skills, see Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 530, note 240.
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 530, note 240.
7. ↑ For this company, see the keywords on the website of HWPH Historisches Wertpapierhaus AG ( accessed on June 13, 2016).
8. ↑ ^{a b} Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 54.
9. ↑ That is another name for the Emslandlager Aschendorfermoor.
10. ↑ Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 53 f.
11. ↑ Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 54 f.
12. ↑ On the moor university see also briefly Renate Faerber-Husemann: School for life - in hell! Fritz Erler, the moor soldier in the Aschendorfermoor concentration camp , in: Vorwärts extra. 150 years of the SPD , (2/2013), p. 86 f.
13. ^ Fritz Erler: The long Hans. Image of a bog soldier (five parts). In: The Free Trade Union (Berlin), November 7, 1946-12. November 1946, here first continuation.
14. ↑ See Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 56 f.
15. ↑ Heinz Sierian: The Rollwand camp in Nieder-Roden (with editorial notes), information pages on the Rollwald camp (accessed on June 27, 2016).
16. ^ Soell: Fritz Erler , p. 57.
17. ^ Fritz Erler: The long Hans. Image of a bog soldier (five parts). In: The Free Trade Union (Berlin), November 7, 1946-12. November 1946.