Hugo Benzinger

Hugo Benzinger (also: Hugo Benziger ; * December 14, 1900 in Ludwigsburg ; † November 13, 1944 in Tübingen ) was a German tailor and councilor in Tübingen.

Life

The master tailor Hugo Benzinger was a leading KPD member in Tübingen - since 1925 he was active in the Tübingen workers 'movement and in the workers' cultural associations. He was elected chairman of the Proletarian Stage and Education Club founded in 1927. In the article he wrote, Proletariat und Bühne , Benzinger emphasized the spirit of collectivism : “The proletarian 'art' is the masses themselves, collectivism is the revolutionary language of the proletariat”. In 1928, at the instigation of Ferdinand Zeeb, Benzingers and the chairman of the Dannhausen cycling club, the left-wing culture and sports cartel was founded.

Benzinger had been running a master tailor's workshop at Kronenstrasse 10 since 1931. In the same year he was elected to the Tübingen municipal council as the first and only KPD member. Benzinger was noticed there by partly harsh party-political rhetoric, which met with widespread resistance from other local councils, in particular that of the lawyer and later exiled Jew Simon Hayum .

When the communists in Tübingen distributed leaflets calling for a general strike on January 31, 1933, the day after Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, four of them were arrested on March 10 of that year, followed by the two KPDs on March 11 -Members Ferdinand Zeeb from Hagelloch and Hugo Benzinger taken into so-called “ protective custody ”.

The new National Socialist interior minister of Württemberg Wilhelm Murr relieved Benzinger his duties with immediate effect on 28 March 1933, even before the DC circuit of the local council. Benzinger and his wife Nina had already been put under pressure by the SA and the police, which controlled the couple's mail. Since party and trade union officials had been arrested since mid-March and taken into "protective custody", Benzinger had to expect another arrest. He went into hiding for a few weeks and only when his wife had been threatened that she would be taken into protective custody for him did he turn himself in on April 23, 1933. He was detained in Heuberg concentration camp . In December of the same year Benzinger was transferred to the Oberer Kuhberg concentration camp in Ulm . His wife Nina Benzinger, who was also a member of the KPD and is said to have “even appeared as a speaker for the party”, was taken into protective custody in August 1933, but released after two weeks. Benzinger, however, was released from prison in May 1934, ill and depressed, but had to report regularly to the police, and from 1936 to the Gestapo . In 1935 the KPD tried to set up an anti-fascist resistance group in Tübingen through Benzinger, but he no longer wanted to take any risks.

Shortly after the start of the Second World War , Benzinger was drafted into the 2nd Wehrmacht replacement battalion in Schwäbisch Gmünd in October 1939 . There he was involved in the preparations for the war against France. The slender man was deliberately used in all weathers and for hard work. This not only caused him to become seriously ill physically, but also to weaken mentally. After several hospital stays , he was released from the Wehrmacht in April 1940. The physically weakened man died four years later of heart failure at the age of almost 44.

Nina Benzinger continued the workshop at Kronenstrasse 10 even after the Second World War. The couple had no children.

Honor

On November 10, 2015, a memorial plaque with a text written by the cultural scientist Martin Ulmer was unveiled in the Tübingen Town Hall in memory of the Tübingen municipal council members who had previously been democratically elected in the course of the takeover in 1933 . Under the heading “ You are not forgotten ”, the name of Hugo Benzinger can be found in the first place.

Fonts

• Proletariat and stage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Martin Ulmer: Destroyed Democracy ... , pp. 25–27
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Helmut Fielhauer , Olaf Bockhorn (ed.): The other culture. Folklore, Social Sciences, and Worker Culture. A conference report , Vienna; Munich; Zurich: Europaverlag, 1982, ISBN 978-3-203-50798-9 and 3-203-50798-6, pp. 267, 272f .; Preview over google books
3. ↑ ^{a b} Youkyung Ko: Between Education and Propaganda: amateur theater and film Stuttgart worker cultural movement during the Weimar Republic , while dissertation in 2000 at the University of Tübingen, Stuttgart; Leipzig: Hohenheim-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 978-3-89850-969-5 and ISBN 3-89850-969-9 , p. 55; Preview over google books
4. ↑ oV : Simon Hayum. Memories from exile. Life path of a Tübingen citizen (= Kleine Tübinger Schriften , booklet 29), Tübingen: Universitäts-Stadt Tübingen, Kulturamt, 2005, ISBN 978-3-910090-66-8 and ISBN 3-910090-66-4 , p. 29; Preview over google books
5. ↑ Ursula Krause-Schmitt , Heinz Koch (Red.): Local history guide to places of resistance and persecution 1933 - 1945 , Vol. 5: Baden-Württemberg , Part 2: Administrative districts of Freiburg and Tübingen , ed. from the study group for the research and communication of the history of the German resistance 1933-1945, Frankfurt am Main: VAS, 1997, ISBN 978-3-88864-223-4 and ISBN 3-88864-223-X , p. 292; Preview over google books
6. ↑ [author covered by a payment barrier]: So that the victims are not forgotten. A plaque in the town hall commemorates city councilors who were robbed of their office by the Nazis in 1933 . In: “ Schwäbisches Tagblatt ” dated November 11, 2015, last accessed on August 2, 2017

literature

• Martin Ulmer: Destroyed Democracy. Tübingen city councils forcibly resigned in 1933. A documentation (= Kleine Tübinger Schriften , issue 39), ed. from the Geschichtswerkstatt Tübingen eV, Tübingen: University City of Tübingen, Department of Culture, 2013, ISBN 978-3-941818-16-3 , pp. 25ff. u.ö .; Table of contents
• Hartmut Boger et al. : Arbeitsertübingen. On the history of the labor movement in a university town , 2nd edition, ed. from DGB , local group Tübingen, Tübingen: Schwäbische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981, ISBN 978-3-88466-066-9 and ISBN 3-88466-066-7 ; contents