Martha Strasser

Stolperstein by Martha Strasser

Martha Strasser ; née Decker, formerly Drumm (born November 21, 1910 in Wiebelskirchen , † January 18, 2002 in Berlin ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Martha Decker was born in Wiebelskirchen as the daughter of a miner. After elementary school she worked as a nanny for a Steiger family in 1924 , then she went to Bad Kreuznach as a nanny and then to Berlin. In 1929 she returned to the Saar area and joined the SPD . There she met Hermann Drumm , whom she married in April 1933.

During the time of the Saar referendum , her husband was involved in the united front . After the result of the vote was announced on January 15, 1935, Hermann Drumm was threatened with death in a torchlight procession by the German front . They tried to break into his home that night, but failed. The next day, the two fled the Saar area and settled via Carcassonne , Blaye and the Puy-de-Dôme department to La Combelle . Her husband worked there as a miner for some time until the Spanish Civil War began in 1936 . While her husband went straight to the front, she took a course at the Red Cross and then worked as an operations nurse for the International Brigades .

After her husband died on September 1, 1937 at the Battle of Belchite , their son Hermann was born on December 5, 1937 in Albacete . In October 1938 Martha Drumm went back to La Combelle in France. Her and her husband's involvement in the Spanish Civil War was sharply criticized among the SPD members who lived in exile in France. Martha Drumm turned away from the SPD and moved to Montluçon in the Allier department , where a number of Saar emigrants who had also fought in the Spanish war had settled. There she met Josef Strasser , a KPD member from Bavaria . The two became a couple. While Martha Drumm worked as an assistant, Strasser took care of her son. In April 1943 the couple escaped from the Gestapo and joined the Resistance .

In October 1945 she and Strasser moved to Rosenheim in Bavaria. She joined the KPD and ran for the city council election in 1946. Since an unmarried woman was out of the question for the list, she married her partner before the election. The couple stayed in Rosenheim until the KPD was banned in 1956, but then moved to Karl-Marx-Stadt in the German Democratic Republic because their husband, as a former KPD member, could no longer find work. Josef Strasser died on July 10, 1968 in Karl-Marx-Stadt. Martha Strasser later moved to Berlin , where she died on January 18, 2002. Martha Strasser was awarded the GDR Patriotic Order of Merit and the Florence Nightingale Medal of the International Red Cross .

literature

• Max Hewer: From the Saar to the Ebro. Saarland as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. 2nd, corrected edition, Blattlausverlag, Saarbrücken 2016, ISBN 978-3-945996-08-9 .
• Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Gerhard Paul : The splintered no. Saarlanders against Hitler . Dietz, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-8012-5010-5 , p. 55-60 .
• Gottfried Hamacher with the assistance of André Lohmar, Herbert Mayer, Günter Wehner and Harald Wittstock: Against Hitler. Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-320-02941-X , p. 48 ( rosalux.de [PDF]).
• Hermann Drumm: Marta Strasser - A contemporary witness of the 20th century (1910–2002), in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue I / 2007.

Web links

• Martha Drumm, b. Decker in the Wiki "Righteous of Care"

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hermann Drumm: Spain War and Resistance: Stations in the life of Marta Strasser . In: Association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime - Bund der Antifaschisteninnen and Antifaschisten (ed.): Antifa. VVN-BdA magazine for anti-fascist politics and culture . No. 11/12 , 2010, p. 19 ( vvn-bda.de ).