Jakob Fetz

Jakob Wilhelm Fetz , nickname Köbes (born August 11, 1905 in Sülz (Cologne) ; † March 21, 1946 in Berlin ) was a German KPD functionary and concentration camp prisoner who was executed in the Soviet occupation zone after the Second World War .

Life

Fetz was the son of a carpenter. He also became a carpenter and earned his living accordingly. During the Weimar Republic he became a member of the KPD and gained regional fame as a party official in Cologne at the end of the 1920s. At first he was political director in Cologne-North, led a sticky column and from 1929 belonged to the district leadership. In the early 1930s he led the red mass self-protection. At the end of July 1929 and mid-February 1930 he was sentenced to two and three months' imprisonment for his work for the illegal Red Front Fighter Association and a successor organization, the Antifascist Protection Association. After his imprisonment in Siegburg Prison, he was arrested again in 1932 for offenses against explosives and taken into custody. At the beginning of the National Socialist era , at the end of October 1933, the Reichsgericht sentenced him to a three-year prison sentence for high treason , taking into account the pre-trial detention he had already served.

After his imprisonment expired at the end of October 1935, however, Fetz was not released from prison, but sent to the Esterwegen concentration camp in mid-January 1936 and from there transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp that same year . On April 20, 1939, he was released from the concentration camp as part of Adolf Hitler's "birthday amnesty" . Registered in the A-card index , however, he was still under surveillance by the Gestapo . His marriage ended in divorce in 1939. Shortly after the beginning of the Second World War , he was again taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a politically backward opponent of National Socialism .

At the beginning of May 1940, Fetz was transferred as a political prisoner to the Neuengamme concentration camp (prisoner number 194), where he was employed as a Kapo of the carpenters' column and then in the labor service office. By the protective custody camp leader Wilhelm Schitli , he was appointed camp elder in Neuengamme concentration camp in January 1941 as the successor to the morphine-addicted prisoner Richard Maschke. He thus held the highest position in the prisoner function hierarchy in Neuengamme and was ready to cooperate with the camp SS in order to keep this post. The historian Detlef Garbe describes the work of Fetz as a camp elder in the Neuengamme concentration camp as follows:

“Since Fetz carried out public executions on the roll call square by order of the SS, this met with strong displeasure among his party comrades. His strong position, which he achieved through brutality, a strict regiment of order, patronage of offices and relationships of dependency, promotion of political comrades and at the same time maintaining good contacts with prisoner functionaries willing to cooperate, also with green and black triangles, guaranteed in Neuengamme a stabilization in the ongoing struggle for power in the functional system '. For although he did not submit to any 'party discipline', he also covered those political prisoners who organized the establishment of resistance circles. "

In November 1944, Fetz was recruited with other prisoners in the Neuengamme concentration camp for the SS special unit Dirlewanger and was deployed in combat operations in Slovakia from January 1945 and a few weeks later in the area around Guben . With other former concentration camp prisoners of his unit, he succeeded in converting to the Red Army near Burg in mid-April 1945 , where he was a parliamentarian . Initially assigned to a division of the Red Army as an auxiliary worker, he was released at the end of April 1945.

After the end of the war he lived in Berlin, where in June / July 1945 he helped to build up the local group of the KPD in Tempelhof. In 1945 he was arrested and sentenced to death by shooting by a Soviet military tribunal in Berlin on February 2, 1946 for war crimes, mistreatment and involvement in the hanging of prisoners in Neuengamme concentration camp. On March 21, 1946, Fetz was executed.

literature

• Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52965-8 .
• Günter Bers: A regional division of the KPD: The Middle Rhine district and its party congresses in the years 1927/1929 . Einhorn-Presse Verlag Främcke, Reinbek near Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-887560-21-3 .
• Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner , Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947). A historical-biographical study . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36968-5 .

Web links

• Open archive of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial

Individual evidence

1. ^ Günter Bers: A regional structure of the KPD: The district of Middle Rhine and its party congresses in the years 1927/1929 . Einhorn-Presse Verlag Främcke, Reinbek near Hamburg 1981, pp. 141f.
2. ↑ Open archive of the Neuengamme Memorial, entry Jakob Fetz (to be found using the search function)
3. ↑ Detlef Garbe: Neuengamme - main camp . In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme , Munich 2007, p. 320
4. ↑ Detlef Garbe: Neuengamme - main camp . In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme , Munich 2007, p. 320
5. ↑ ^{a b} Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner, Andreas Weigelt: Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944–1947). A historical-biographical study , Göttingen 2015, p. 135