Georg Lechleiter

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Georg Lechleiter

Georg Lechleiter (* 14. April 1885 in Appenweier ; † 15. September 1942 in Stuttgart ) was chairman of the Communist faction in the parliament of the Republic of Baden and head of a resistance group in Mannheim in the era of National Socialism .

Life

The son of a small farmer was supposed to become a pastor after attending primary school. After a few weeks he left the seminary and completed an apprenticeship as a typesetter from 1900 to 1903 . He then went on a hike and worked in various cities in Baden and Switzerland, where he became a member of the Socialist Party . During the First World War he remained in Switzerland as a conscientious objector .

After the war he returned to Germany and in 1919 was one of the co-founders of the KPD local group in Mannheim. The 5th party congress of the KPD in 1920 elected him to the central committee. As a member, he took part in the unification party convention of the USPD (Left) with the KPD in 1920. From 1920 to 1922 he was political secretary of the KPD district leadership in Baden. As a member of the “right” wing of his party, he became a member of the Mannheim city ​​council in 1922 . As chairman of the cooperative printing company, he was instrumental in founding the communist Arbeiter Zeitung in Mannheim and was its editor in charge in 1922/23. Because of this activity he was sentenced in 1923 to sixteen months of imprisonment, thirteen months of which he had to spend at Gollnow Fortress. From 1924 to 1933 he represented the KPD in the Baden state parliament as a member of the state parliament and was chairman of the KPD state parliament group until his removal from office in April 1932.

Immediately after the National Socialists came to power and before the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933, he was arrested by the Nazis and held in the Ankenbuck and Kislau (Baden) concentration camps . From April 1935 he was drafted into the labor service at the Westwall and finally released in 1937. Lechleiter returned to Mannheim, worked as a typesetter and, together with other communists, established contacts with social democrats and non-party workers in large Mannheim companies and brought them together to form a resistance organization before the Second World War. Since September 1941, four issues of the illegal newspaper Der Vorbote have appeared under his direction . The resistance group around Lechleiter, made up of social democrats and communists, whose task it was to distribute leaflets, included Anton Kurz , Ludwig Moldrzyk , Rudolf Maus , Rudolf Langendorf , Eugen Sigrist , Max Winterhalter , Robert Schmoll , Jakob Faulhaber , Daniel Seizinger , Johann Kupka , Richard Jatzek , Ludwig Neischwander , Henriette Wagner , Albert Fritz , Bruno Rüffer , Willi Probst , Hans Heck , Philipp Brunnemer and his wife Luise as members.

When the fifth issue of the newspaper Der Vorbote , which was produced by simple means, was just being prepared, the Gestapo launched a massive wave of arrests on February 26, 1942, which Lechleiter also fell victim to. With him were u. a. Jakob Faulhaber, Max Winterhalter, the Philipp Brunnemers , Daniel Seizinger, Rudolf Maus, Eugen Sigrist, Alfred and Käthe Seitz families were arrested, sentenced to death by the 2nd Senate of the People's Court in Mannheim on May 15, 1942 and on the morning of September 15 Beheaded by guillotine in Stuttgart in 1942 (see also Stuttgart Regional Court # Lechleitergruppe ). Three of the main defendants (Hans Heck, Fritz Grund and Willi Probst) were tortured to death while in custody, 19 of the 32 arrested members of the group were executed; the rest were sentenced to imprisonment. The group's arrest was used as an excuse for further arrests.

Appreciation

Lechleiter memorial

In Mannheim's Schwetzingerstadt , on Georg-Lechleiter-Platz, which was named as early as 1945, there is a memorial for the resistance fighters of the Lechleiter group by Manfred Kieselbach (1988).

On the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof one was stele made of black granite built for the victims of Nazi justice. There you can find the names of Georg Lechleiter and other members of his group.

literature

  • Max Oppenheimer: The Harbinger of the Fall . Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  • Fritz Salm: In the shadow of the hangman . 2nd Edition. Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-87682-033-2 .
  • Erich Matthias , Hermann Weber (Hrsg.): Resistance against National Socialism in Mannheim . Edition Quadrat, Mannheim 1984, ISBN 3-923003-27-7 .
  • Günter Braun: Georg Lechleiter: A Mannheim Communist In: Michael Bosch, Wolfgang Niess (Ed.): The resistance in the German southwest 1933-1945 . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-17-008365-1 .
  • Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online [accessed June 1, 2020]).
  • K. Drobisch, E. Fölster: Lechleiter, Georg . In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical Lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 270-271.
  • Fritz Endemann: National Socialist Criminal Justice in Stuttgart. In: Schwäbische Heimat , year 42, 1991, issue 4, pages 303-313, here: 308-310.
  • Sebastian Gewert: Georg Lechleiter (1885-1942) - head of the KPD resistance in Mannheim . In: Angela Borgstedt et al. (Ed.): Courage proven. Resistance biographies from the southwest (= writings on political regional studies of Baden-Württemberg , published by the State Center for Political Education Baden-Württemberg, vol. 46), Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 9783945414378 , pp. 91–98.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lechleiter, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Member of the Baden state parliament and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Appenweier
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 1942
Place of death Stuttgart