Hermann Tops

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hermann Tops on a GDR postage stamp from 1963
Gravestone in Berlin cemetery park

Hermann Tops (born July 18, 1897 in Berlin , † August 14, 1944 in Brandenburg an der Havel ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Tops was a toolmaker . From 1919 he was a member of the Metalworkers' Association and from 1923 of the Communist Party , for which he was part of the Prenzlauer Berg district council .

Hermann Tops was married to Lucie Tops (1906–1964) and had a son named Fritz Engel (1927–1945). As a schoolboy he belonged to the communist sports club Fichte Berlin and from 1931 was a gymnastics warden of Berlin-Brandenburg on the board of the combat group for red sports unit .

In the first year of National Socialist rule, Tops was arrested and sentenced to more than a year in prison. In 1939 Hermann Tops became a member of the communist resistance group around Robert Uhrig . He was arrested on February 4, 1942, sentenced to death on June 21, 1944 together with Ernst Knaack , Heinrich Preuss , Wilhelm Rietze and Arthur Sodtke, and executed in the Brandenburg penitentiary on August 14, 1944 .

In the GDR, Hermann Tops was honored as an anti-fascist and resistance fighter. The former Ludwigstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, on the southern edge of the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark , was renamed Topsstrasse in 1952 in Tops' honor; it's still called that today. There was also a Hermann-Tops-Straße in Brandenburg an der Havel, but it is now called Kreyssigstraße.

In 1976, a memorial plaque was placed on the house in Kopenhagener Strasse 46 in Prenzlauer Berg, where Tops lived until 1942, but it is no longer there. From 1977 to 1991 a polytechnic high school in Prenzlauer Berg was called "Hermann Tops Oberschule"; the building is now used by the school on Falkplatz . From 1987 to 1992 a memorial plaque in the Prenzlauer Berg district office at Fröbelstraße 17 commemorated Gustav Schiefelbein and Hermann Tops.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Small encyclopedia of physical culture and sport . Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig, Leipzig 1960, p. 601 .

swell

personal data
SURNAME Tops, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1944
Place of death Brandenburg on the Havel