Leon lion head

Leon Löwenkopf (born December 10, 1892 in Szczerzec near Lemberg , Austria-Hungary , † December 15, 1966 in Zurich ) was a German social democrat , resistance fighter, concentration camp prisoner and, after 1945, co-founder of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN) and organizer the Jewish beginning again in Dresden.

Life

Löwenkopf's parents moved to Dresden in 1908, where they ran a textile business. He went to Vienna and learned the hat-making trade and did a commercial apprenticeship. In 1913 he too moved to Dresden, but was then drafted as an Austro-Hungarian soldier in the First World War. Back in Dresden he worked as an insurance agent. He joined the General Jewish Workers' Union at an early stage and was its second chairman from 1919 to 1932. In 1930 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1934 he emigrated to Palestine with his wife . In 1936 he went to Warsaw , where he worked as an insurance agent . His parents were expelled from the German Reich during the Poland campaign in 1938 . They fell victim to the Holocaust in 1942.

In October 1940 he was imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto . In 1942 he managed to escape to the other part of Warsaw and joined a Polish-Jewish resistance group . However, the lion's head was caught and sentenced to death . He was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp , then to the Auschwitz concentration camp and finally to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In 1945 he was one of the participants in a death march towards Schwerin , where he was liberated on May 3, 1945.

In August 1945 he met his wife again in Dresden. He joined the Jewish community of Dresden and was its first chairman until he fled to Düsseldorf in 1953 . The construction of the synagogue in 1950 was thanks to his dedication . Löwenkopf worked in the “Local Committee of Victims of Fascism”, which became part of the local social administration. In 1946 he joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and in February 1947 was one of the founders of the VVN in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). He also became President of the Saxon State Credit Bank . Since 1947 he was a member of the VVN's inner board. In 1950 he was imprisoned for three months after being denounced . As a result of the Slansky trial , the anti-Semitic arrest of Paul Merker and the anti-Semitic language of an SED party resolution, he fled to West Berlin in January 1953 . On January 21, 1953, the VVN executive board excluded him as a "Zionist agent" from the VVN.

In Düsseldorf he worked again in his profession as an insurance agent and belonged to the local Jewish community . In 1957, he and his wife moved to Switzerland , where they became members of the Cultusgemeinde Zurich .

literature

• Nora Goldenbogen: Leon Löwenkopf, first chairman of the Jewish community in Dresden after the Shoah. Attempt to approach. In: Susanne Schönborn, Michael Brenner (eds.): Between Remembrance and New Beginning: On German-Jewish History after 1945. Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-89975-051-9 , pp. 92–110
• Nora Goldenbogen: “Relentlessly uncovering the sick core!” On the problems of anti-Semitism and its role in the “cleansing” in Saxony 1949–1953, in this., Ed .: Antisemitism and mass murder. Contributions to the history of the persecution of the Jews. Series: Texts on Political Education, 16. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation , Leipzig 1994 ISBN 3929994143 pp. 75–85
• Dresden History Association (ed.): Dresden. The history of the city from the beginning to the present. Junius, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-88506-015-9 .