Jakob Schultheis

Jakob Philipp Schultheis (born September 4, 1891 in Speyer ; † March 19, 1945 in Brandenburg-Görden ) was a social democratic and communist resistance fighter against National Socialism , a founding member of the Speyer Comradeship and a victim of National Socialism.

Life

Jakob Schultheis was born as the son of the shoemaker Philipp Schultheis and his wife Margaretha (née Schwind) in Speyer, attended elementary school there and was a painter in addition to his political activities. He later qualified as a master whiter and owned a thriving business of his own. He had a lot of contact with people, which gave him information and a good political overview. Like his father and grandfather, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1913 at the age of 16 and became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ), but in 1919 he decided for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), but from which he left a year later. At the time of the First World War he was active as a soldier and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Front Fighter Cross of Honor. From 1921 Schultheis became a member of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Party and was again politically active in the SPD until the forced dissolution in 1933. After the transfer of power to the NSDAP in 1933, he illegally continued his resistance to the Nazi dictatorship . He also joined NSKOV and became district leader in the Reich Association of the Physically Disabled in Speyer. As district leader, he had to take his oath on the Führer Adolf Hitler. He lived in Speyer with his wife Emma (* April 1892 in Altlußheim , née Schweikert † 1978), whom he married on May 9, 1914, his son Ewald, who died as a soldier in August 1943, and his daughter Emma (* 1920 in Speyer † 1992), who later married the sergeant Stanislaus Matuszewski (* 1917 in Dortmund ) and worked as an office worker.

The Speyer comradeship

When the married couple Jakob and Emma Schultheis were on their way back to Speyer from a sanatorium in Bad Krozingen near Freiburg im Breisgau in September 1942 , they visited a friend in Singen whom Jakob Schultheis knew from the SPD and from the trade union movement : Georg Blohorn . Jakob Schultheis happened to meet the wife of the imprisoned communist leader Ernst Thälmann . Rosa Thälmann told Schultheis about the terrible fate of her husband and the personal hardship that she and her daughter Irma had to suffer from. Packed with the idea of ​​supporting Ernst Thälmann and his family, the Speyer comradeship was formed around Schultheis in the fall of 1942 . B. organized donation campaigns for the relatives of Ernst Thälmann. This activity became known to the Gestapo in April 1944 , when they smuggled an undercover agent (H. Lübbers) into the family environment. As a result, the Speyer comradeship was also exposed. A large number of the members were arrested.

In Potsdam , negotiations began on February 9, 1945 against Schultheis, his wife and eight other members of the comradeship. Schultheis and his comrade-in- arms Peplinski were beheaded on March 19 in the Brandenburg penitentiary according to the verdict .

After 1945

With the help of a friend, Lieutenant General of the Soviet Army, Mrs. Schultheis fetched the urn of her murdered husband from Brandenburg ad Havel in August 1945 and brought it to Speyer, where an honorary funeral took place at the end of September 1945. Emma Schultheis died in 1978. Her daughter Emma Matuszwewski, who was heavily pregnant at the time of the mass arrests in a barred room at the Speyer Foundation Hospital, gave birth to a daughter there on June 29, 1944. Emma died in 1992. Wolfgang Eger writes in his street name dictionary that it was proposed as early as 1946 that the street where the Schultheis family lived should be renamed “Jakob-Schultheis-Straße”.

On May 11, 2018, " Stolpersteine " were laid in front of the Schultheis family's last place of residence at Im Lenhart 35, 67346 Speyer.

literature

• Extract from the indictment against J. Schultheis and comrades (NJ 14 178) . From: Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED. Central party archive. Documentation center of the MdI (murder register). From: Antifa archive. Hermann W. Morweiser. Ludwigshafen-Edigheim
• Karl Fücks: curriculum vitae of an honest Palatine: Jakob Schultheis . In: Palatinate Forum. P. 39, 1990
• Dorothee Menrath: Jakob Schultheis . In: Speyer: Quarterly magazine of the tourist association . Issue 45 (2005), pp. 23-24, 2005