Heinrich Eduard Miesen

Heinrich Eduard Miesen , also Heinrich Eduard vom Holt (born October 2, 1913 in Cologne-Nippes ; † August 4, 1947 there ) was a German editor , foreign reporter , Christian opponent of National Socialism , prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp and publishing director and writer .

Life

Miesen came from the Catholic family of an official . After attending elementary school , he passed his Abitur at Realgymnasium . During his school days he joined the Bund New Germany . He then studied at the University of Cologne medicine , at the same time philosophy , history and German studies . With the transfer of power to the NSDAP , his career aspiration became illusory: the person suffering from cardiac asthma since childhood should not have been allowed to work as a doctor in the Nazi state . Miesen finally received his doctorate in 1938 at the Philosophical Faculty on The Problem of Self-Understanding in Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy . During his studies he already worked as a trainee for the supraregional Kölnische Volkszeitung and was later employed there as a feature editor . This newspaper had to cease publication, and the press of the Nazi authorities into line was. Heinrich Eduard Miesen had meanwhile acquired the pseudonym of Holt and found a job as a foreign reporter for the Netherlands , Poland and the Ukraine with the West German observer . Because he made no secret of his opposition to National Socialism and his active commitment to the defense of Jewish fellow citizens became known to the Gestapo , he was taken into “ protective custody ” on the night of November 10, 1938 and moved to the notorious EL-DE building on Cologne's Appellhofplatz been delivered.

In April 1944 he wrote the first parts of his book Weltfahrt im Herz. Doctor's diary . With his wife Margarete, geb. Hautz, and his two children Ingrid and Karl-Jürgen (his daughter Ruth was born in 1946), he found shelter with a farmer in Reiferscheid (Westerwald) after the bombing in Cologne. It was this farmer who overheard the Miesen couple's conversations and passed them on to the local police. On September 3, 1944, Heinrich Eduard Miesen was arrested as part of the Grid Action and tortured in the prison of the former Carmelite monastery in Koblenz . Under the baseless accusations of collaboration with the bombers of July 20 , he was sent to Dachau deported and got the prisoner number 118867. He was released from the concentration camp on April 29, 1945.

When the Nazi rule was eliminated, he worked as editor for the camp newspaper Der Antifaschist . Now he has also expanded his work, a doctor's book, to include his experiences in a concentration camp. Von Holt, alias Miesen, became a license holder , publishing director and chief editor of the Balduin-Pick publishing house in Cologne , where he also published his book. Even a translation into Japanese appeared in 1950. His chronic heart condition, made worse by his imprisonment, had already led to his death in August 1947.

As part of the project "Names instead of Numbers", Heinrich Eduard Miesen was introduced in 2011 by his eldest great-granddaughter Julia Zimmermann (born 1992 in Cologne) on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp and in the memory book that is there in the Protestant church, recorded.

Publications

• The problem of self-understanding in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche , Würzburg-Aumühle: Triltsch, 1938
• World trip to the heart. Diary of a doctor / Heinrich Eduard Vom Holt, Cologne: Pick 1947

literature

• Nico Rost (Ed. And with materials and an afterthought by Wilfried F. Schoeller ): Goethe in Dachau. A diary , Munich 2001, ISBN 3-548-60023-9 - The Dutch resistance fighter Nico Rost was a fellow prisoner of Miesen in Dachau and is mentioned several times in his book.