Helmut Gansauge

Helmut Gansauge (born July 3, 1909 in Dresden ; † July 23, 1934 there ) was a German anti-fascist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Grave of Helmut Gansauge in the Heidefriedhof

Gansauge was born in 1909 as the first of four children in poor circumstances. His father was often unemployed, while his mother Frieda Gansauge earned money as a treacher. Gansauge started school in 1916 in Lausa near Dresden; two years later the family moved back to Dresden. Gansauges parents were politically active: the father was a member of the Spartakusbund and was appointed to the soldiers ' council after the Kiel sailors' uprising ; the mother was a member of the KPD and co-founded the communist children's groups in Dresden . Gansauge was already doing auxiliary work in the KPD when he was a child and adolescent; from 1923 he served as a courier. After finishing elementary school, Gansauge began an apprenticeship as a printer in 1925 , which he had to end prematurely in 1927. In the following years he worked irregularly as an unskilled worker in printing works.

From the mid-1920s and already during his apprenticeship, Gansauge was active in the Communist Youth Association and became a member of the association's speaking choir, from which the agitprop group Rote Raketen developed in 1927 . He became the second leader of the group, which from 1928 was the "most important agitprop troop of the party in Saxony" and which until 1933 was "known far beyond Dresden and Saxony". Appearances with the Red Rockets took Gansauge to central Germany and Berlin.

After the National Socialists came to power , Gansauge became a member of the United Climbing Department in Dresden and actively participated in the resistance struggle. He was arrested on March 21, 1933 and first interrogated and mistreated in the Volkshaus and after four days in the Dresden police headquarters . He was brought to the Hohnstein concentration camp in 1933 and, seriously ill, released at the end of November. His mother was also detained while he was in detention. Gansauges was arrested for the second time in December 1933 and was only allowed to leave police headquarters after several weeks in prison. Gansauge died in the summer of 1934 as a result of pneumonia, at which time his body was "severely weakened by the imprisonment and torture ... [and] not able to withstand the test of time." Gansauges urn grave is located in the honor grove of the Dresden Heidefriedhof .

Commemoration

In the GDR various institutions bore the honorary name of "Helmut Gansauge": The Deutsche Reichsbahn maintained the holiday home "Helmut Gansauge" in Johanngeorgenstadt with the Dresden civil engineering company . The VVN local group in Dresden also bore the honorary name "Helmut Gansauge".

literature

• Helmut Gansauge . In: Heinz Schumann, Gerda Werner ( edit .): Fight the human right. Life pictures and last letters from anti-fascist resistance fighters . Dietz, Berlin 1958, p. 654.
• Gansauge, Helmut . In: Museum für Stadtgeschichte, Alfred Werner (arr.): They fought and died for the coming law. Brief biographies of Dresden workers' functionaries and resistance fighters II . Meißner Druckhaus, Dresden 1963, pp. 39–42.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gansauge, Helmut . In: Museum für Stadtgeschichte, Alfred Werner (arr.): They fought and died for the coming law. Brief biographies of Dresden workers' functionaries and resistance fighters II . Meißner Druckhaus, Dresden 1963, p. 41.
2. ↑ Helmut Gansauge . In: Heinz Schumann, Gerda Werner ( edit .): Fight the human right. Life pictures and last letters from anti-fascist resistance fighters . Dietz, Berlin 1958, p. 654.
3. ↑ Thomas Widera: Dresden 1945–1948: Politics and society under Soviet occupation . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, p. 368, FN 172.