Karl Stenzel (resistance fighter)

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Karl Stenzel (born April 23, 1915 in Leipzig , † November 20, 2012 near Berlin) was a communist resistance fighter from Leipzig who also participated in the resistance in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In 1990 he became general secretary of the International Sachsenhausen Committee.

Life

Karl Stenzel was born as one of four siblings. The father was a locksmith, the mother worked as an investor in the graphic industry. After eight years of schooling, Karl Stenzel began an apprenticeship as a locksmith in 1929. As a teenager he was active in the workers' swimming club in Leipzig-East, and from 1931 in the “Kampfgemeinschaft Rote Sporteinheit”, where he was promoted for the Communist Youth Association . There he became head of organization in Leipzig-East. Since he was unemployed after completing his apprenticeship as a locksmith in 1931, he devoted all of his time to political work and was arrested several times for short periods during this time.

In June 1933, Karl Stenzel was caught after handing out leaflets and was sent to the newly established Sachsenburg concentration camp for five months . After his release, he immediately contacted the illegal Communist Youth Association, which organized the resistance in small groups. In 1934 he was sentenced to three months in prison for distributing leaflets. Even after that, he continued to participate in the organized resistance, until the illegal KPD organizations in Leipzig were almost completely smashed at the end of 1934. In the course of this, he was arrested again and sentenced to six years in prison for “preparing for high treason”. He spent this in the Waldheim penitentiary , near Chemnitz, and Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel , in between he was repeatedly sent on transport and was in a moor camp in Emsland .

After serving his six-year prison sentence, Karl Stenzel was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on November 15, 1941 . There he was first transferred to the "Corpse Carrying Command", where he had to transport the corpses of the Soviet prisoners of war. Later he was a foreman in the inmate mail room. He quickly got in touch with the illegally organized communist resistance in the camp and took part in various actions. In the summer of 1944 he was allegedly denounced in the course of the investigation of a special commission of the Reich Security Main Office to smash the resistance organizations in the camp and was put in isolation and then in the penal company. Finally he was transferred to the subcamp in Falkensee , where he worked for the last nine months as a foreman in grenade production and was again active in the illegal party group. There, with the participation of the illegal camp committee, an evacuation was prevented, so that he was spared the death march. The Falkensee satellite camp was evacuated by Soviet troops on April 26, 1945.

After the liberation, Karl Stenzel returned to Leipzig and resumed political work. In 1947 he went to Berlin, where he met his future wife Lore. In the 1950s served in the diplomatic service in China. After his return in 1957 he was party secretary at the FDGB trade union college and worked in the management department of the GDR Council of Ministers .

Since he retired in 1980, he has been involved in the Sachsenhausen camp working group and was one of the founding members of the Sachsenhausen Committee in the Federal Republic of Germany. He campaigned for the preservation of the Sachsenhausen memorial and took part in the consultations on the redesign. He organized tours through the Sachsenhausen Memorial and held talks with school classes, youth groups and other interested groups.

literature

  • Karlen Vesper: Light in a dark night. Twelve conversations with other Germans (from Kurt J. Goldstein to Markus Wolf; preface by Heinrich Fink), Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn, 2010, ISBN 978-3-89144-427-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://gedenkstaette-sachsenburg.de/biografien/karl-stenzel/
  2. ↑ https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/805347.karl-stenzel.html
personal data
SURNAME Stenzel, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist resistance fighter and SED functionary
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig , Saxony
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 2012
Place of death near Berlin