Kurt Gruber (resistance fighter)

Kurt Gruber (born May 13, 1912 in Hövel , today Hamm ; † March 20, 1945 near Schwege , Osnabrück district) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism . He died while working for the US intelligence service OSS when his plane, which was supposed to parachute him behind the front, crashed.

Life

Kurt Gruber was a German miner , anti-fascist and KPD functionary. Kurt Gruber's only brother, Karl, had already been shot by the Nazis in his place on March 24, 1931 ; Contemporary witnesses say that his funeral, with well over 3000 participants, almost the entire population of the miners' settlement in his hometown , was the largest demonstration that Ahlen had seen in Westphalia up to then.

After the seizure of power by the Nazis had Gruber into illegality; even afterwards he obviously played a central role in organizing the resistance. In 1934 he was suspected by the public prosecutor's office of being the “Reich technician” of the KPD. The Oberreichsanwalt reserved his own prosecution. Because of his great endangerment, the communist party sent Kurt Gruber to emigrate to Prague in 1935. From there, Kurt Gruber went to Berlin as a courier more than ten times.

After the occupation of Czechoslovakia , he managed to escape to Great Britain, to Glasgow . There he worked as a miner again, became a member of the Scottish Miners Union and was very active in the Free Germany movement there. In the summer of 1944, Kurt Gruber married Jessie Campbell from Scotland. During this time he published a brochure entitled I am a German Miner (I am a German miner) .

In 1944 Joseph Gould , the head of the Labor Division of the OSS office in London, contacted the Free German Movement in Great Britain in order to recruit suitable candidates from their ranks for a scout mission in Germany. Contact was made through Jürgen Kuczynski , the then head of the Free German Movement. Kurt Gruber was among the seven chosen, who were instructed by US military intelligence officer Joseph Gould. They were supposed to jump behind the German front on behalf of the OSS to convey information to the Allied forces. Kurt Gruber died on his first mission on March 20, 1945 when the plane that was supposed to drop him crashed in bad weather. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom .

Shortly after the end of the war, the OSS was disbanded and taken over by the CIA . This only informed his wife about his death, without any further details. The family also knew nothing of the posthumous award. She received a one-time compensation of $ 3,000. The details of Kurt Gruber's death did not become known until decades later when the OSS documents were released for historical research.

Honors

In April 2006, he was posthumously awarded the US Order of Silver Star .

literature

• Uwe Rennspieß: Beyond the railway: History of the Ahlen miners' colony and the Westphalia colliery. Klartextverlag, Essen 1989, ISBN 3-88474-340-6 (with a chapter on Karl Gruber and information on Kurt Gruber on p. 295).
• Kuno Bludau: Gestapo - secret: Resistance and persecution in Duisburg 1933–1945 (= series of publications by the research institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 98; Duisburger Forschungen, 16). Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1973, ISBN 3-87831-149-4 .
• Heike Bungert: The National Committee and the West. The reaction of the Western Allies to the NKFD and the Free German Movements 1943–1948. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1997.
• Joseph Gould : An OSS Officer's Own WWII Story: Of His Seven German Agents and Their Five Labor Desk Missions into Warring Germany. Unpublished memoir. Washington, DC 1989.
• 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; Vol. 53) (PDF; 894 kB). Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 2005.

Web links

• Special Forces Roll Of Honor
• "FLICKr: The grave of Kurt Gruber"
• The OSS and the London “Free Germans” / The CIA on the “Free Germans” - including Kurt Gruber
• Memory of a "German Miner" on www.drafd.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kurt Goldstein : We are the last - ask us. Speeches and writings 1974–2004. Edited by Friedrich-Martin Balzer . 2nd edition Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn 2005, ISBN 3-89144-362-5 , pp. 25-27.
2. ^ Uwe Rennspieß: Beyond the Railway: History of the Ahlen miners' colony and the Westphalia colliery. Klartextverlag, Essen 1989, ISBN 3-88474-340-6 , chapter: From the death of the young communist Karl Gruber to the “Battle of the Heessener Busch”, pp. 264–266.
3. ^ Uwe Rennspieß: Beyond the Railway: History of the Ahlen miners' colony and the Westphalia colliery. P. 295.
4. ↑ Ruth Werner: Sonja's Report. Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-355-01721-3 , p. 306.
5. ↑ Werner Goldstein: Three Berliners jumped over Berlin (PDF; 1.1 MB) in the DRAFD information December 2001.
6. ↑ Christian Wolff: Wreckage discovered after 70 years. Ahlener Zeitung, October 9, 2015.
7. ^ NARA, RG 226, Records of the OSS 148, Box 101-102, File 149-1750 (referenced in: The OSS and the London 'Free Germans ).
8. ↑ Memory of a "German Miner" on www.drafd.de