Ludwig Szymczak

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Ludwig Szymczak (born December 10, 1902 in Leßnau , Putzig district in West Prussia ; † April 4, 1945 in Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp ) was a communist worker in the Ruhr area and an economic emigrant in the Soviet Union .

Life

Ludwig Szymczak came to the Ruhr area as an adolescent and became a miner in ( Gelsenkirchen-Buer ). He sympathized with the KPD and joined the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). Because of repeated unemployment, he decided to take work in the Soviet Union. In Ukraine he found a job in mining. His attempts to become a member of the Soviet Communist Party and a Soviet citizen were unsuccessful. Because of alleged services for the NKVD , he quarreled with German workmates. He was arrested in May 1937. He suffered torture while in custody in Stalino . After being forced to work for the NKVD in Germany, Szymczak was expelled from the Soviet Union in January 1938. Statements of his also designated work colleague Franz Sellikat (after the war as a witness in the trial Emil Carlebach against Margarete Buber-Neumann Carlebach's denial of the Stalin -Terrors assisted) in the Gestapo , Szymczak had "for the GPU work" and have Sellikats brother Charles entry Seduced into the Red Army , where he was then shot, brought Szymczak to the Buchenwald concentration camp .

At the end of August 1943, Szymczak was transferred to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, a newly created satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. There he was deputy camp elder and held this position until March 1944. Due to his refusal to hang a fellow prisoner, Szymczak was locked in the camp's own prison for two weeks together with camp elder Georg Thomas. He then worked in the warehouse in the labor statistics department.

Szymczak later belonged to a resistance group in the camp organized by Albert Kuntz . After the camp resistance was discovered, Szymczak was arrested on December 12, 1944. According to a report by a fellow prisoner, Szymczak volunteered for the KPD camp group as deputy camp elder in the Dora-Mittelbau subcamp. Together with six other members of the camp resistance movement, Szymczak was murdered by Gestapo employees on April 4, 1945 in the courtyard of the camp's own prison.

literature

  • Wilhelm Mensing: From the Ruhr to the GULag Victims of Stalin's mass terror from the Ruhr area. Essen 2001, pp. 339, 322ff.
  • Lutz Niethammer : The "cleansed" anti-fascism. The SED and the red kapos from Buchenwald. Berlin 1994, p. 443.
  • Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.): Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp 1943–1945 Accompanying volume for the permanent exhibition in the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial. Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0118-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.): Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp 1943-1945 Accompanying volume for the permanent exhibition in the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial, Göttingen 2007, p. 94.
  2. ↑ Volker Bode / Christian Thiel: Rocket tracks - armory and military base Peenemünde. Berlin 1995, p. 100.
personal data
SURNAME Szymczak, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Communist worker in the Ruhr area and economic emigrant in the Soviet Union
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Leßnau , Putzig district , West Prussia
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 1945
Place of death Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp