Käthe Limbach

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Käthe Limbach (born February 19, 1915 in Saarbrücken as Käthe Westenburger , † September 4, 2003 ibid) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism and a member of the KPD .

Life

Käthe Westernburger grew up in Saarbrücken as the daughter of a communist working-class family and was active in communist associations from an early age. She was a young pioneer and then a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD). In the referendum campaign she was involved in the united front . After the Saar area was annexed to the German Empire, it remained in Saarbrücken. Walter Brückner , the chairman of the KPD, which operated illegally in the Saar area, suggested that she reactivate and lead the Association of Young Communists. She participated in the smuggling of leaflets and was arrested for the first time in August 1935 and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, which she served first in Saarbrücken and then in Frankfurt am Main.

When she was released in 1938, her parents had been sentenced to prison terms as members of the Red Aid organization . Westernburger continued to be monitored by the Gestapo until it was evacuated to Hesse in 1940 as part of the attack on Poland and the construction of the Siegfried Line . There she met her first husband, whom she married in 1941. The marriage produced a daughter. When her husband was called up for military service in 1942, she came back to Saarbrücken. In October 1944 it was bombed out and evacuated to Thuringia. Their second daughter was born there. After the war she returned to Saarbrücken with her daughters. Her husband went missing and was pronounced dead in 1956.

In 1956 she married Emil Limbach. She herself was active in the KPD and the workers' welfare . She was also a founding member of the Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime - Association of Antifascists on the Saar, of which she was a member of the state board in the mid-1960s. Until it was banned, she was also a member of the Democratic Women's Association of Germany (DFD), which was only banned in Saarland in 1961. She remained loyal to the KPD even after the KPD was banned and then joined the DKP in 1968 . In the 1970s she got involved in the peace movement and took part in the Easter marches . In the 1980s, together with Maria Röder and Irene Bernard, she was the organizer and guide of the alternative city tours in Saarbrücken, which led to places of Nazi crimes.

In 1988 she was awarded the Saarland Order of Merit by Oskar Lafontaine (official announcement on June 27, 1989).

literature

  • Luitwin Bies: Käthe Limbach . In: Luitwin Bies / Horst Bernard (ed.): Saarland women against the Nazis. Persecuted - Evicted - Expropriated . Blattlaus-Verlag, Saarbrücken 2004, ISBN 3-930771-31-4 , p. 57-62 .
  • FrauenSichtenGeschichte: a project by the women's office of the state capital Saarbrücken and the women's library saar (ed.): … Groundbreaking. More women's street names for Saarbrücken! 2nd Edition. Saarbrücken September 2011, p. 21–22 ( saarbruecken.de ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Announcement of awards of the Saarland Order of Merit . In: Head of the State Chancellery (Ed.): Official Gazette of the Saarland . No. 35 . Saarbrücker Zeitung Verlag und Druckerei GmbH, Saarbrücken July 13, 1989, p. 995 ( uni-saarland.de [PDF; 206 kB ; accessed on June 2, 2017]).