Kaufmann-Will-Kreis
The Kaufmann-Will-Kreis was a bourgeois group in Giessen, directed against the war and the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler , with resistant behavior in the form of systematic listening to " enemy broadcasters ", oppositional discussions and boycott of Nazi collections.
In contrast to other resistance groups, the Kaufmann-Will-Kreis did not initiate any external political actions, but became known because the trial against the group before the People's Court in 1942 was used as an example to intimidate opposing conservative citizens and as a new stage in Nazi terror applies to the inside. The circle is named after the two members who were sentenced to death: Alfred Kaufmann and Heinrich Will . Since only Kaufmann was the head and initiator of the group, some historians also refer to it as the “Kaufmann Circle”. This is what he was called in documents and newspaper reports until 1987. Only then was it renamed "Kaufmann-Will-Kreis" in the "Notices of the Upper Hessian History Association" in order to put the artist at the center of the group.
Emergence
From 1896 the pastor Alfred Kaufmann had taught the later "Führer deputy" Rudolf Hess , to whose family he also had good contacts, as a teacher, pastor and school principal of the "German School" in Alexandria . From 1933 he regularly referred to this fact in his many lectures in different parts of the German Reich, and it was advertised when his lectures were announced. In autumn 1933 and April 1934 he visited his former student Hess in Munich and corresponded with him from 1930 to 1938.
The orientalist and theologian Alfred Kaufmann, who has lived in Gießen since 1929 and initially a supporter of a national-conservative tendency (1919–1929 German National People's Party ), came under increasing scrutiny from the Nazi authorities from 1937 onwards due to his lecture tours and his refusal to give the Hitler salute. Finally, the clubs that invited Kaufmann to give lectures were put under surveillance and in 1938 he was forbidden to travel to the Orientalist Congress in Brussels.
Kaufmann maintained a wide range of contacts in other European and Arab countries and so he listened to so-called "enemy broadcasters" even before the outbreak of war in order to obtain independent information. Kaufmann was rather isolated within the predominantly provincial middle class of Giessen. However, his unusual charisma led him to a wide range of contacts with those also affected by the repression of the Nazi regime, who finally met for informal discussions in his apartment. He first found these contacts among his federal brothers from the Giessen Wingolf , a Christian and non-beating student union; among them were the pastors Ernst Steiner and Adolph Kalbhenn. Since the beginning of the war, the so-called “Friday wreaths” have been attended by : the painter Heinrich Will and his wife Elisabeth, Steiner's wife Helene, the teachers Emilie S. and Antonie Baur, the branch manager Stefanie H., the wife of the sick university professor Falckenberg, Ms. Hildegard Falckenberg, Dr. med. Werner Schmidt, Kaplan Hans Werner Strasser, Prof. Walther Klüpfel, Auguste Scharmann and the medical student Renate Roese.
The meetings were loosely organized from around 1940, some participants took part regularly, others only once or occasionally. Mostly foreign radio stations were heard, films from Kaufmann's trips to the Orient were shown and the fate of the war and the stupidity of the Nazi celebrities were discussed. During the war it was decided to boycott the collections of the propaganda Nazi winter aid organization .
Denunciation and show trial
With the ban on Wingolf connections from 1935 and the dissolution of the Wingolf Association in 1936, the Wingolf House in Gießen became the central federal archive of all dissolved connections. Therefore, the federal archivist Imgart moved with his wife Dagmar Imgart in 1936 from Halberstadt to Giessen. Dagmar Imgart was a Swedish citizen and a staunch supporter of the Nazi regime. She worked against payment and out of conviction as agent V140 (code name "Babs") for the Gestapo department 4B (church observation). It forced itself on the circle around Alfred Kaufmann as an agent provocateur in order to be able to provide the Gestapo offices with information that was as useful as possible. An arrest of the circle was determined by them on February 6, 1942 and the agent tried to get all members to participate in the circle for that evening under a fictitious pretext.
On the evening of February 6th and on the morning of February 7th, Alfred Kaufmann, Heinrich Will, Elisabeth Will, Ernst Steiner, Emilie S., Stefanie H., Hildegard Falckenberg and Renate Roese were arrested; other participants, including the agent who was also apparently arrested, were initially released. This was followed by brutal Gestapo interrogations and the enforcement of statements through false confessions. The prisoners were transported to Darmstadt . Pastor Ernst Steiner was beaten to death in the Gestapo prison there; this was officially rumored by the Gestapo as a suicide.
After a show trial on 20./21. In July 1942, before the 2nd Senate of the People's Court , who traveled to Darmstadt especially , Alfred Kaufmann and Heinrich Will were sentenced to death, and other women from the district (including Elisabeth Will) were sentenced to several years in prison. This process, with its first application of the maximum penalty in accordance with the Ordinance on Extraordinary Broadcasting Measures of September 1, 1939, was widely publicized. Some historians (including Jörg Friedrich ) regard this show trial as a particular turning point in the intensification of the Nazi terror internally.
Despite several requests for clemency, Heinrich Will was executed by guillotine on the evening of February 19, 1943 in the Frankfurt-Preungesheim prison. The following day, by order of the People's Court, the execution was posted in all of Gießen and the surrounding area; on February 21, company parties, school parties and a day off at school were ordered to mark Will's execution. Elisabeth Will had already been “released to Auschwitz” as a Jew from the Ziegenhain women's prison on December 7, 1942 (letter from the prison board) and was murdered there.
Several requests for clemency were also made for Alfred Kaufmann. He was finally "pardoned" to life in prison and transferred to Butzbach prison, where American troops liberated him on April 1, 1945 (after inhumane prison conditions). He died a broken man in 1946 at the age of 78 as a result of imprisonment.
Legal review after 1945
The Gestapo agent Dagmar Imgart was (also because of the denunciation of the executed Pater Max Josef Metzger ) by multiple instances of tribunals convicted and courts in the last instance to 1 year and 3 months imprisonment (minus eight months detention) for aiding and abetting false imprisonment and entered 1957 a six-month Detention on. She lived in Bensheim from 1960 and died in Seeheim-Jugenheim in 1980 .
Historian controversy and judgment
The processing and historical evaluation of the Kaufmann-Will circle has been the subject of controversial discussion in Giessen over the past 20 years. The main reason for this is that the publications about it were not made by professional historians, but by history teachers, sociologists or the city's magistrate. Each group tries to pursue their own, often widely diverging interests and points of view through the Kaufmann-Will circle.
Either there are relationships to participants in the trial before the People's Court (one would like to be stylized as a resistance group in the narrower sense), or the fact of resisting behavior is completely negated on the basis of the extorted Gestapo protocols, since one is oppositional behavior from the circle of would like to reject the national-conservative bourgeoisie in principle.
An assessment and documentation of the Kaufmann-Will circle by a historian who was not arrested in Gießen interest groups would be urgently needed and worthwhile. In particular, the circle is an example of how in the process of the Nazi dictatorship the oppression and persecution (especially during the war) gradually encroached on the conservative bourgeoisie and how people in a dictatorship can also maintain an internal opposition and independence for their own To protect human dignity against propaganda and terror.
literature
- Kurt Heyne: Resistance in Gießen and the surrounding area 1933-45 , messages from the Upper Hessian History Association Gießen, New Series 71 (1986), Gießen 1986 (on the Kaufmann-Will-Kreis p. 216 ff)
- Bertin Gentges et al. a .: Heinrich Will - Life and Work , Gießen 1993
- Werner Schmidt : Life on Borders - autobiographical report of a doctor from dark times , Frankfurt am Main 1993 ISBN 3-518-38662-X
- Jörg-Peter Jatho: The Gießener Friday wreath, documents on the failure of a historical legend - at the same time an example for the disposal of National Socialism , Fulda 1995 ISBN 3-98017-406-9
- ders .: "Titan" and subject. Notes on Dr. Alfred Kaufmann and Heinrich Will. A reply to "Heinrich Brinkmann: The Heinrich Will case or dealing with sources." 13 editions. Giessen, 1997-1999.
- ders .: Questions about Heinrich Will and the "Gießener Friday wreath". 2nd Edition. Giessen, January 2009.
- Christian G. Schüttler: Festschrift for the 50th re-establishment of the Gießen Wingolf , Gießen 1998
- Gerlind Schwöbel: Only hope kept me. Women report from the Ravensbrück concentration camp , Frankfurt am Main 2002 (among other things on Antonie (Tona) Baur) ISBN 3-87476-399-4
- Jörg Friedrich : The fire - Germany in the bombing war 1940-1945 , Munich 2002 (to Kaufmann p. 452 f) ISBN 3-54860-432-3 .
- Hedwig Brüchert-Schunk: Examples of bourgeois resistance in Hesse: The Heinrich Roos Circle of Friends in Wiesbaden and the Kaufmann-Will Circle in Giessen . In: Renate Knigge-Tesche Axel Ulrich (Hrsg.): Persecution and resistance in Hesse 1933-1945 . Frankfurt / M. 1996 ISBN 978-3821817354 , pp. 508-524.
- Jochem Schäfer: Goethe and his late work "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre" in the light of the resistance against National Socialism: The German Hiking Day 1927 in Herborn and its consequences . Books on Demand , June 2011 (on the Kaufmann-Will-Kreis p. 59) ISBN 978-3842344280
