Josef Schappe

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Josef Anton Schappe (born April 28, 1907 in Graach an der Mosel ; † November 7, 1994 in Ratingen ) was a German politician ( KPD , UAPD , SPD ) and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime in Ratingen and Düsseldorf.

Youth and early years

Josef Schappe was born on April 28, 1907 in Graach in the Bernkastel-Wittlich district. He worked as an unskilled worker in the wine industry, as a worker in a coffin factory, and later as a functionary and youth representative of the labor movement in Bad Kreuznach . As a young functionary he attended the trade union school in Hirschberg ( Lower Silesia ), where he was familiarized with topics such as labor law, history and political theory. Between 1925 and 1927 he worked in an engine factory in Cologne-Deutz , toured Germany and wrote articles for various newspapers. Schappe finally ended up in Düsseldorf , where he quickly caught up with the organized labor movement and joined the KPD. Through a foreman at Haniel and Lueg , he made the acquaintance of Peter Waterkortte , the editor of the communist newspaper Freiheit in Düsseldorf, and the local editor-in-chief Erich Glückauf , before he finally moved to neighboring Ratingen in 1929.

In Ratingen and Düsseldorf, Schappe was a member of the communist youth groups and a delegate of the metalworkers' association and completed a journalistic traineeship at Freiheit . In 1930 he became a member of the district leadership of the KPD for the Lower Rhine district, friendship with Karl Schabrod . From 1931 Schappe was a permanent editor at the Freedom and head of the Communist Youth Association in the Lower Rhine district.

Persecution and Resistance 1933–1945

On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire , Schappe was arrested and mistreated by the Gestapo on the street in Ratingen. He was one of the first prisoners in the Düsseldorf area who were taken into “ protective custody” on that day due to the new emergency ordinance of the Reich President . Schappe remained in custody until March 2, 1934, first in Ratinger, then in the Düsseldorf police prison in Mühlenstrasse, where he was again mistreated. After Schappe was released again, he worked actively in resistance work in Ratingen and Düsseldorf; This concentrated primarily on the reconstruction of the structures of the KPD and its subsidiary organizations that had been destroyed by the first mass arrests in the spring of 1933. On March 22, 1935, he was returned to the Düsseldorf police prison on Jürgensplatz under the prisoner number 2599 , where he remained until April 8 and was interrogated. The III. The Criminal Senate of the OLG Hamm opened the proceedings against Schappe on September 23, 1935, and it ended with a three-and-a-half year prison sentence “for preparation for high treason ”. He served this sentence in the Lüttringhausen penitentiary near Remscheid until the end of 1938 , when Schappe was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp . Since January 1940, Schappe was part of the illegal camp committee in Buchenwald and headed the Niederrhein group with 36 members. In Buchenwald, Schappe was only liberated by US troops in April 1945.

post war period

In October 1945 Schappe became chairman of the Ratinger KPD; 1945/46 he belonged to the appointed district advisory board of the district of Düsseldorf-Mettmann and the council of the city of Ratingen. For the first democratic local election on September 15, 1946, he successfully ran for the new council and was also editor-in-chief of the KPD's central organ Free People . In 1948 he was expelled from the KPD because of “ Titoist tendencies”. Along with Wolfgang Leonhard, who had returned from Belgrade, and the Bavarian KPD functionary Georg Fischer (1906–1980), Schappe was one of the founders of the Titoist Independent Workers' Party of Germany (UAPD) in Frankfurt am Main, which stood for revolutionary socialism with a democratic character. In 1952 he joined the SPD and began work as a social democratic councilor and parliamentary group leader in Ratingen until 1972. Shortly before his death, the parliamentary group appointed him honorary chairman.

Honors

  • 1980 Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon
  • 1994 honorary chairman of the SPD local association Ratingen
  • 1996 Street name in Ratingen-Ost

literature

  • Josef Schappe: Stay a decent guy, everything else doesn't count! The eventful life of an old Ratinger. In: The couch grass. Ratinger and Angerländer Heimatblätter 60 (1990), pp. 52–56.
  • Bastian Fleermann : Josef Schappe (1907–1994). In memory of a local politician from Ratingen and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. In: Ratinger Forum. Contributions to urban and regional history 11 (2009).
  • Hermann Tapken (Ed.): Ratingen 1933 to 1945. National Socialism and World War II. Ratingen 1990.
  • Walburga Fleermann: Resistance to National Socialism 1933-39. Shown using the example of the city of Ratingen. Bonn / St. Augustine 1979.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Kuhlemann : The Left in West Germany after 1945. The first post-war period between social democratic integration and the Stalinism of the KPD . Hanover 1978; Hermann Weber : The SED and Titoism. Wolfgang Leonhard on his 90th birthday . In: Germany Archive 4/2011, online at http://www.bpb.de/themen/ PQ3CU9,3,0, Die_SED_und_der_Titoismus.html.
personal data
SURNAME Schappe, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schappe, Josef Anton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politicians (KPD, SPD) and resistance fighters against the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Graach on the Moselle
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1994
Place of death Ratingen