Karl Wegmann

Karl Wegmann (born August 20, 1906 in Montigny near Metz , Lorraine , † January 7, 1981 in Nordhausen ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism and an interbrigadist .

Life

The son of a railroad worker completed an apprenticeship as a painter after attending school . In 1922 he joined the social democratic youth organization Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend , in 1926 in the Reichsbanner and in 1926 in the SPD .

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he emigrated to France in 1933 . He became a member of the KPD in 1936 and went to Spain in the same year , where he was part of the Thälmann Battalion of the XI during the Spanish Civil War until 1939 . International Brigade fought. He fled to France in 1939 and was interned in the Argelès-sur-Mer camp and in the fortress of Marseille until 1941 . Then he was shipped to Algeria and taken to the Djelfa camp. From January 1943 he was used in a work company of the British Army to build a desert road in the Sahara . After being granted Soviet citizenship in December 1943, he was transported to the USSR via the Mediterranean , Palestine and Iran . He received special training in Moscow and was then deployed as a partisan in Belarus . From the summer of 1944 until the end of the war in 1945, he was involved in Operation Beresina for almost ten months with Karl Kleinjung , Hans-Hugo Winkelmann and Walter Steffens .

Wegmann returned to Germany in 1945 and went to the Soviet occupation zone . From 1945 to 1951 he served in the German People's Police in Liebenrode in the Nordhausen district . Here he worked again with Karl Kleinjung, who was district police director of Nordhausen in 1946. Wegmann became a member of the SED in 1946 and from 1951 worked as a department head in a Nordhausen company and as head of the rural trading cooperative (BHG) Liebenrode.

Wegmann last lived in Nordhausen and died at the age of 74.

Awards

• 1976 Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold

literature

• Gottfried Hamacher et al. (Ed.): Against Hitler. Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement. Short biographies (series: Manuscripts / Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung , Volume 53) . 2., corr. Edition. Dietz, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-320-02941-X , p. 209.
• Helmut Wagner: The war of German secret services against the East since 1917 . edition ost, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-360-01829-8 , p. 607.