Kurt Schmidt (resistance fighter, 1905)

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Kurt Schmidt (born January 14, 1905 in Marten near Dortmund , † March 12, 1938 in Alcañiz , Spain ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against fascism .

Life

After elementary school and a locksmith apprenticeship at Union , Kurt Schmidt became a member of the SPD . Because he worked for a colleague, he lost his job and then worked as an unskilled worker and track builder for the tram . Because of the SPD compromises in the construction of the armored cruiser A , he switched to the KPD in 1928 . Schmidt became a member of the works council . In 1931 he married Therese "Resi" Fischer . The marriage remained childless.

Schmidt was a member of the management of the Dortmund sub-district of the KPD and a city ​​councilor . After the National Socialist seizure of power on March 5, 1933 , he was no longer able to take up his mandate for the Prussian state parliament because of political persecution. He was released from custody in the Steinwache on Easter 1933. At the beginning of 1934 he fled from the Gestapo to Holland , then to the Saar region and later went into hiding as "August Hartmann" in France, where he continued his resistance activities against the Nazi regime.

From 1937 he fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans in the battalion " Edgar André " against the Franco fascists. He fell in a battle near Alcañiz in the province of Teruel .

His friends called him "Long August" because of his height of 1.96 m. In 1979 , in memory of Schmidt, the Langer August cultural center in Dortmund's northern city was named after him.

literature

  • Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933 (BHE), Vol. I (1980), p. 655
  • Günther Högl: Resistance and persecution in Dortmund 1933 - 1945. Permanent exhibition and documentation on behalf of the City Council of Dortmund created by the city archive. Opened: January 30, 1981 , Dortmund (city archive) 2nd improved edition 1981 (Kurt Schmidt p. 116)
    • Günther Högl (Ed.): Resistance and persecution in Dortmund 1933-1945. Catalog for the permanent exhibition of the Dortmund City Archives in the Steinwache Memorial and Memorial Site , Dortmund (Wittmaack Verlag) 1992 ISBN 3-9802117-7-0 (Kurt Schmidt p. 161)
  • Schmidt, Kurt . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst: German Communists. 2004, p. 677.
  2. ↑ Under this name he is briefly mentioned in some books about the Spanish civil war: Brigada International is our honorary name ... Experiences of former German Spanish fighters , selected and introduced by Hanns Maaßen, 2 vol., 2nd edition, Berlin ( military publisher of the GDR ) 1976 (Vol. 2, p. 206); Pasaremos. German anti-fascists in the national revolutionary war of the Spanish people. Pictures, documents, memories , Berlin (Deutscher Militärverlag) 1966 (p. 64)
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist and resistance fighter against fascism
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Marten near Dortmund
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1938
Place of death Alcañiz , Spain