Kaiser / Riegraf Group

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The Kaiser / Riegraf group was a socialist resistance group from Heilbronn during the National Socialist era .

Karl Kaiser (1900–1986) was the son of an industrialist from Heilbronn and around 1930 worked in the Berlin branch of his father's food factory, Kaiser-Otto AG . His wife Sophie (called Sascha) Kaiser (1899-1983) was born Witkowsky and came from a noble Galician family. The couple had been in the KPD opposition (KPO) since the late 1920s and moved from Berlin to Heilbronn in 1931, where they worked with the local KPD . After the “ seizure of power ” in 1933, through the KPD city councilor Wilhelm Schwan , they came into contact with the former SPD city ​​councilor Ernst Riegraf and his son Hellmut Riegraf , the latter in turn brought the social democrat Wilhelm Jaisle and the anarcho-syndicalist Eugen Freimüller to the group more communists and social democrats came up.

The group organized conspiratorial meetings at which opposition groups received political training and instructions on how to behave before the Gestapo and the court. The district leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party (SAP) in Mannheim, which was already underground , delivered leaflets, the newspaper Das Banner des Revolutionärär Marxismus and sticky notes, which were distributed by the Heilbronn group. Writings were also received from Stuttgart through the submerged district leadership of the KPD and Walter Vielhauer . The meeting points were the apartment of Sascha and Karl Kaiser in the Villa Hagenmayer , Dittmarstraße 5 (later Oststraße 5) and David-Friedrich-Straße 5 (today Erlenbacher Straße). But people also met, for example, in the outdoor pool in Bad Rappenau or in the forest near Ilsfeld . Dr. Karl Kaiser worked as an assessor at the Heilbronn District Court , which temporarily saved him from being discovered by the Gestapo.

In March 1936, the group took part in a supraregional sticking action, in which sticky notes with the inscription "Hitler means war" were stuck between Aachen and Lörrach on the occasion of the upcoming Reichstag election . In the summer of 1936, after a careless remark by a drunken worker to an SA man from Heilbronn, Sophie and Karl Kaiser, who had since moved to Mannheim, Hellmut Riegraf, Eugen Freimüller and Wilhelm Jaisle were temporarily arrested and interrogated, but released again for lack of evidence.

Monitored by the Gestapo, the group continued their conspiratorial meetings. However, at the SAP conference in Basel in November 1935, the Gestapo had already smuggled in an informant and, through a teacher in Pforzheim, was able to locate the Mannheim district management of the SAP and from there the Heilbronn group. In 1938, as part of the break-up of the southwest German SAP structures, Sophie and Karl Kaiser, Hellmut Riegraf, Wilhelm Jaisle, Hermann Gerstlauer, Paul Engel and Eugen Freimüller were arrested and sentenced to several years' imprisonment or prison terms, mostly for high treason . Only Karl Kaiser could be covered by the group and remained unpunished.

literature

  • Susanne Stickel-Pieper (arrangement): Trau! Look! Whom? Documents on the history of the labor movement in the Heilbronn / Neckarsulm area 1844–1949. Distel-Verlag, Heilbronn 1994, ISBN 3-929348-09-8 , in the book ISBN 3-923348-09-8 .
  • Markus Dieterich: It can cost us our heads. Anti-fascism and resistance in Heilbronn 1930–1939. Distel-Verlag, Heilbronn 1992, ISBN 3-923208-35-9 .
  • Christhard Schrenk , Hubert Weckbach , Susanne Schlösser: From Helibrunna to Heilbronn. A city history (=  publications of the archive of the city of Heilbronn . Volume 36 ). Theiss, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-8062-1333-X .
  • Uwe Jacobi : That was the 20th century in Heilbronn. 1st edition. Wartberg-Verlag, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2001, ISBN 3-86134-703-2 .
  • Uwe Jacobi: The missing council minutes. Record of the search for the unresolved past. 1st edition. Heilbronner Voice , Heilbronn 1981.

Web links

Sophie and Karl Kaiser 1937
Link to the picture

(Please note copyrights )

Individual evidence

  1. Uwe Jacobi: Heilbronn, as it was . Droste, Düsseldorf 1987, ISBN 3-7700-0746-8 , p. 97.