Hans Wichmann (politician)

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Memorial plaque for Hans Wichmann in Danzig, Sieroca 6

Hans Wichmann (also Wiechmann ) (born April 30, 1895 in Danzig ; † May 25, 1937 ibid) was a German politician ( SPD and Social Democratic Party of the Free City of Danzig ) and a victim of National Socialism.

Life

Hans Wichmann visited the elementary and middle school and then went to do an apprenticeship as a pharmacist without a degree. Later he worked as a seaman, shipyard and construction worker. During the First World War , he did three years of military service in a sailor division . After the war he first became an employee and in 1929 an official of the railway. The railway management Danzig was a result of the separation of the Free City of Danzig under Article 104 of the Versailles Treaty of Polish railways been assumed. He was a member of the railway works council for eight years and was chairman of the works council for seven years. From April 1929 he was also an honorary labor judge.

politics

Hans Wichmann belonged to the Social Democratic Party of the Free City of Danzig . In the People's Day elections on May 28, 1933 , he was elected for his party in the Danzig People's Day , the parliament of the city-state. He was also able to defend his mandate in the massively falsified People's Day election in Gdansk in 1935 . After the SPD was banned in Danzig on October 14, 1936 by the National Socialists, the pressure on the Democratic MPs increased further. The aim of the NSDAP was to force the remaining opposition MPs to convert to the NSDAP parliamentary group in order to demonstrate their fiction of a " national community ". The means of intimidation included protective custody , bribery, dismissal from service, and sheer violence.

assassination

On May 25, 1937, Wichmann was arrested on his way home from a parliamentary group meeting around 11 a.m. (regardless of his parliamentary immunity ) and has since disappeared. The police said they released him after briefly questioning him. On June 15, a body was found in a sack on the border with Poland. The rumors that it was about Wichmann's corpse were denied by the NSDAP. The intervention of the League of Nations Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt at the Senate of the Free City of Danzig led to a turning point in the presentation. In September 1938, the widow of the last Gdansk SPD chairman Arthur Brill received a letter dated August 20, 1937, which allegedly came from Wichmann in Abarán , Spain. In this letter, Wichmann accused Brill of betraying SPD members to the Nazis and accusing him of being to blame for Wichmann's flight to Spain. Ms. Brill handed this letter to the police and filed a criminal complaint for insult. In September 1938, Carl Jacob Burckhardt was invited by the Senate. He was shown the letter as proof that Wichmann was still alive. At the same time, Mrs. Wichmann was let in, who recognized her husband's handwriting. Carl Jacob Burckhardt reports that shortly before the end of the war, Senate President Arthur Greiser confessed to him that the letter was a forgery and that Wichmann had died as a result of torture by the Gestapo.

Erich Brost reported in a letter to the SOPADE party executive on July 22, 1937 that the remaining members of the SPD parliamentary group had agreed in a letter to Edmund Beyl , President of the People's Day , to join the NSDAP parliamentary group as interns on January 24, 1938 . In return, the destitute widow Wichmann was to receive a pension of 150 Gulden per month and the two underage children were to receive free school fees .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a facsimile of the letter can be found in the appendix to Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939
personal data
SURNAME Wichmann, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wiechmann, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD)
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1937
Place of death Danzig