Herbert Grämmel

Herbert Grämmel (born February 25, 1911 in Breslau ; † July 13, 2007 ) was a German communist resistance fighter , Buchenwald prisoner and contemporary witness .

Life

Herbert was born as the oldest of seven children in the family of the locksmith Oswald Grämmel and his wife Anna née Reichold, a white seamstress. He and his younger brother took over the collection of union dues on weekends . Father Oswald was chairman of the SPD local group, mother Anna was involved in the women's movement . As a nine-year-old, he experienced the workers' defensive struggles against the Kapp Putsch . The struggle for a daily livelihood was also no stranger to him. Especially the plight of the inflation period, in which even working-class families became “billionaires”, left him with disgust and hatred of those in power who allowed such a thing to happen. From 1917 to 1925 he attended elementary school . Then he started an apprenticeship as a plumber for gas and water. Even then he became a member of the union. In 1927 he became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ). During the varied home evenings, he recruited other apprentices to join the union. This displeased his master, so that he was dismissed by him before he finished his journeyman examination. After two months of unemployment, he received an offer to work in a plumbing department in the district town of Schweidnitz , where he immediately moved. The local SAJ group led a miserable club life, so that he immediately set about activating the youth group. After the local group had grown significantly, he was elected 1st chairman. Two years later he also joined the SPD.

In numerous conversations with his comrades, he expressed his rejection of the political position of the SPD party leaders, which in 1931 resulted in him being expelled from the party and from the SAJ. He joined the left-wing socialist group around Kurt Rosenfeld and Max Seydewitz and worked in the Socialist Workers' Party (SAP).

With the transfer of power to the NSDAP , he had to secure his livelihood with a wide variety of jobs. He became politically active in an anti-fascist resistance group of the SAP. From 1934 he was used as a courier who smuggled the magazines, brochures and educational material from Czechoslovakia to Silesia , which were now banned in the German Reich . He collected reports on illegal work, on resistance in the factories and against military armaments, took them with him to the CSR , where they were printed and then brought back to Silesia by courier. As a camouflage, he travels with a comrade in order to divert political suspicion from the supposed “lovers”. As a result of treason - as he suspected - he was arrested by the Gestapo in Waldenburg in November 1935 . After a year of pre- trial detention , the “Trial against Kalinke and Comrades” took place in November 1936 before the Berlin “ People's Court ”. Grämmel received a sentence of three years in prison and seven years of loss of honor. He served his sentence in Plötzensee , Brandenburg-Görden and Waldheim . During the two-year stay in Waldheim he experienced the solidarity and human help of his fellow prisoners , which he practiced in secret .

After his release from Waldheim in November 1938, the Gestapo immediately admitted him to the Buchenwald concentration camp and was given the prisoner number 625. He was lucky that he was employed as a plumber in the locksmith's department. He became a column leader and was able to divert bread for his fellow prisoners when building an SS service building . In June 1940 he was released "on a trial basis" from the concentration camp because his father Oswald was able to convince a friend of his plumber to write an application for release stating that he was looking for a journeyman plumber. After the birth of his daughter Elvira in October 1941, his wife died after a serious illness in January 1942. Because of this emergency, he looked for a new mother for his child. In October of the same year he married Anna Kutsche. Only a month later he was drafted into the Penal Division 999 as “ unworthy of defense ” . After several stops he came to the homestead of a French farmer . Here he and his comrades were captured by British soldiers and taken to Algiers and from there by ship to England . It didn't stop there. He went on to Canada and finally to the USA . In Camp McCain of Oklahoma , he participated along with other mind that also established and interned Wehrmacht soldiers clarify the futility of war. But there were also counter-attacks by fanatical Nazis. That went up to beating attacks when he z. B. at the funeral for a deceased soldier refused to show the Hitler salute . For fear of being beaten to death, he even had to put himself under the protection of the US military. He was moved to a different barrack, and finally the entire anti-fascist 999s were moved to another camp in Davis , Massachusetts . There they even published an anti-fascist newspaper. They also taught language and technical knowledge at training evenings, and they founded a choir and did cultural work. After the capitulation on May 8, 1945 , that all changed. Now the prisoners had to work more and were given a lower meal rate. Now the American guards themselves set up retraining courses in order to be able to use the soldiers to be released in the future occupation zones in a suitable manner. Grämmel attended a police course in Rhode Island , then in December 1945 to Germany and was released in Darmstadt in January 1946 . From here he made his way illegally across the zone border to Erfurt and into the SBZ , obtained the relevant papers and was able to have his wife and daughter join them. First as a stoker in the Soviet headquarters , in 1947 as a gas fitter in the Erfurt municipal utilities, he later attended a master's course for gas supply and use at the technical school in Markkleeberg and in 1959 became an auditor in the Erfurt energy supply. Then he was transferred to Suhl as a production engineer and was responsible for the gas supply in two large districts. In another distance learning course in 1965, he earned his degree as an engineer , so that he now worked in several functions in the southern Thuringia area.

True to his socialist convictions, he always carried out political activities in his party over the years: as a group leader in the KPD / later SED , as a circle leader in the party apprenticeship year , as party secretary, as a district leadership member of the SED, as a shop steward . In addition, there was his voluntary work as a sought-after discussion partner in front of schoolchildren and students, in the district and district committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters, in the VdN commission, in the district committee for youth consecration and in the traditional committee of an SED district leadership. As a member of the VVN Association of Antifascists , he was also a sought-after discussion partner for student projects. When he spoke to them about resistance and war, it was always in the sense of Buchenwald's oath , which had become his purpose in life.

literature

• Buchenwald, I can't forget you , Eds. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Peter Hochmuth and Gerhard Hoffmann. Lebensbilder, Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, 2007 and 2015 ISBN 978-3-320-02100-9 , pp. 31-39