Hermann Meynen

Hermann Meynen (born May 7, 1895 in Mülheim an der Ruhr, † April 5, 1944 in Amberg prison) was a German journalist and victim of the Nazi regime.

Life and activity

Youth and education

Meynen was the third child of the village school teacher Gustav Adolf Meynen and his wife Anna Catharina Gertrud Meynen, geb. Sellerbeck. For health reasons, the father later changed his job and became a textile merchant.

After attending school, Meynen worked as a commercial clerk in the textile trade. From 1914 to 1918 he took part in the First World War as a war volunteer . After the end of the war - which had become a political initiation experience for him - Meynen began to be active in circles of the conservative-militarist right in his homeland. In 1920 he became a member of the vigilante group in Mülheim an der Ruhr, which was founded as a preventive measure to ward off possible attempts at communist insurrection. And from 1923 to 1924 he took part in actions against the separatist movement in Duisburg. Also in 1923 Meynen joined the Young German Order , in which he became deputy grandmaster of the Mülheim brotherhood and treasurer of the Ballei (district) of the Lower Rhine.

From 1918 to 1919, Meynen completed an apprenticeship at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Essen, after which he attended the state weaving school in Bramsche near Osnabrück for six months .

Life until his emigration (1920 to 1936)

From 1925 to 1934 Meynen was managing director of his parents' textile trade in Mülheim. In this position, he was also a member of the Essen Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 1934 Meynen became head of advertising at Der Deutsche Volkswirt publishing house in Berlin.

In May 1933, Meynen joined the NSDAP , but turned away from it around 1935 and found connections to opposition circles directed against the NS system . He became a member of the Confessing Church . Above all, however, he used the inside information that was available to him through his work in the press - at the German economist - to collect compromising information about leading Nazi functionaries and their way of life as well as internal press instructions from the Reich Propaganda Ministry, which he together with like-minded people for used the writing of satiricals about the political situation. These were distributed in illegal private prints as front reports from the theater of war of the Third Reich in early 1936 . After his arrest in 1941, the reports from the front, together with an anti-subversive essay “The government is asking”, formed a charge in his trial before the People's Court .

Emigration to Austria and Eastern Europe (1936 to 1938)

At the end of 1936, two friends and like-minded people of Meynen were arrested by the Secret State Police for their joint anti-regime activities . Meynen managed to evade arrest by fleeing across the Austrian border shortly before the planned access by the secret police . He first went to Tyrol , then in January 1937 to Vienna . There he made his way first as a waiter. In addition, he wrote to the German authorities to acknowledge the reports from the front and took responsibility for them in order to exonerate his captured friends.

From 1937 onwards, Meynen took an active part in the attempt to establish a Catholic exile organization. In this context he worked closely with Peter Bultmann , Klaus Dohrn and Rudolf Möller-Dostali . With these he took part on March 30, 1937 at the constituent meeting of the Christian Reich Association for German Freedom in Vienna. As an exponent of the Young German Order, he also participated in the conferences of the German Front against the Hitler regime and the Preparatory Committee for the establishment of the German People's Council.

Around 1937 Meynen also came into close cooperation with the anti-Nazi regime headed by Otto Strasser and Max Gruschwitz . Among other things, he wrote for the magazine Die Deutsche Revolution published by Strasser , a combat paper directed against the Hitler system.

Given the German occupation of Austria in 1938, Meynen fled to Czechoslovakia. In April 1938 he became an employee of the Central European Service in Budapest . There he met Franz Jung . In July 1938 he went to Sofia as a correspondent for a fruit export company . He also earned his living by writing articles for the Ostkurier magazine in Budapest and the Wirtschaftsblatt Archiv in Sofia.

Emigration to France, imprisonment and death

In August 1938, Meynen went to France because the Bulgarian authorities refused to grant him a permanent residence permit. There he became an employee of Peter Bultmann, for whom he a. a. headed the distribution of the magazine Die Zukunft published by Willi Münzenberg .

From August 1939 Meynen worked under the code names Lemoine and Stallmann with the Deuxiéme Bureau , the French foreign secret service . After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was interned temporarily. On May 14, 1940 there was another internment in the Buffalo camp near Paris and then in various internment camps.

After his escape abroad, Meynen was classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state and an important target. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they will be succeeded by the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

On November 26, 1942, Meynen was arrested by the Secret State Police in Chambons-sur-Lignon and taken to the Maison les Roches camp. Although a medical report classified him as not capable of detention because of a nephritis with edema on his face, charges were brought against him in the People's Court on March 22, 1944 . He died of cardiac paralysis during his trial in 1944 in the Amberg prison hospital.

Today a stumbling stone in front of the house at Friedrichstrasse 9 in Mülheim reminds of Meynen's fate.

family

Meynen was married to Anni Lugscheider (born January 10, 1900) on March 7, 1921, with whom he had three children.

literature

• Werner Röder / Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 , Vol. 1 (Politics, Economy, Public Life), p. 499.
• Elke Seefried: Empire and Estates. Ideas and effects of German political exile in Austria 1933-1938 , 2006.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Meynen on the special wanted list (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
2. ^ Claus Wolfschlag: Hitler's right-wing opponents. Thoughts on National Socialist Resistance , 1995, p. 195
3. ^ Stumbling blocks in Mülheim .