Maurice Gleize
Maurice Gleize (born January 7, 1907 in Nîmes ; † April 20, 2003 in Gournay-sur-Marne ) was a French printer , poet , resistance fighter and surviving inmate of the Laagberg satellite camp in what is now Wolfsburg .
Life
Maurice Gleize came from a working-class family and had three brothers. He grew up in Nîmes, where he began an apprenticeship as a printer at the age of 12 in 1919 and joined the trade union. He was interested in art and attended evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. There he learned to draw. He also learned to play the cello in evening classes . In 1926, against the advice of his father, he gave up the job of printer in order to devote himself entirely to music. He has appeared as a cellist in orchestras and with various ensembles. In 1927 he won first prize at the Conservatory in Nîmes. During a summer tour he met his future wife, a violinist. After getting married in 1930, the couple went to Algeria , where Maurice became a conductor at the Batna Casino . During his stay he noticed the discrimination of the French colonial power towards the Muslim Algerians, which was the origin of his later anti-colonialist engagement. As the casino went bankrupt, the couple returned in 1931 to France and moved to Paris where Maurice Gleize in the printing Gutenberg in the 18th district of Paris near the Montmartre found employment. The print shop mainly worked for workers' organizations, so Gleize came into contact with union members and communists on a professional basis. He continued his musical activities as a cellist in Paris, where he played in Paul Bazelaire's orchestra . With the financial support of a violin maker friend of hers, Gleize was able to acquire the Gutenberg printing works in 1938, whose main customers continued to include trade union associations from the CGT and communist organizations.
Wartime
When the French army was mobilized at the beginning of World War II , Maurice Gleize was drafted as a cook in September 1939. After demobilization , he returned to Paris and reopened his printing house. He was approached by the police that the reopening was against the prohibition of communist propaganda. When leading representatives of the French Communist Party approached him , he put himself in their service. A few months after the German occupation of France , Gleize supported the fight against the occupation from October 1940 by printing socialist and communist publications as well as publications by resistance groups. These included magazines such as L'Humanité , La vie ouvrière , La Terre and Les Cahiers du Communisme . In 1941 he joined the Communist Party and published the first edition of France d'Abord for the resistance organization Francs-tireurs et partisans .
On March 4, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Gleize in his printing works and arrested his comrades with whom he had operated an illegal network of five printing works. Gleize was sent to La Santé prison in Paris ; there he began to write poetry. In 1944 he was transferred to a prison in Compiègne and from there deported to Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany on May 21, 1944 . In May 1944 he was sent as a political prisoner to the Laagberg satellite camp in what was then the "City of the KdF-Wagons near Fallersleben ", later Wolfsburg . The task of the concentration camp prisoners was to set up a large barrack camp for forced laborers from the Volkswagen factory for the series production of the Fi 103 (“ retribution weapon ” “V1”) . In the camp, Gleize was in charge of a communist group among his compatriots for almost a year in prison. When the camp was cleared in April 1945, he and the other prisoners were taken by train to the Wöbbelin reception camp . When he was liberated by US troops on May 2, 1945, he weighed only 33 kg and became seriously ill. a. of typhoid . Because of the hospital stay, he could not return to France until the end of August 1945.
post war period
After his return to Paris, Maurice Gleize resumed his work as a printer. After 1945, his printing company worked for its pre-war clientele, such as various CGT unions. He worked for the Communist Party in particular during election campaigns. In the early 1950s, after the Marty- Tillon affair , he turned away from the Communist Party and joined an opposition group. Maurice Gleize was arrested in 1956 for producing the illegal newspaper "El Ouma" for the Algerian freedom movement and spent three weeks in custody in La Santé prison in Paris, where he was already imprisoned in 1943.
In the post-war period, Maurice Gleize campaigned for the memory of the Resistance . He also printed the magazine of the prisoners' association Amicale Internationale KZ Neuengamme . After retiring in the early 1970s and selling his print shop, he moved to the Paris suburb of Gournay-sur-Marne, where he had lived since 1949. There he devoted himself to music and poetry and published several books.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Maurice Gleize was committed to commemorating the former Laagberg satellite camp in Wolfsburg. For decades there was no memory of the concentration camp inmates at the site. On his initiative, the city of Wolfsburg erected a memorial stele in 1987 in the former storage area in the Laagberg district . Maurice Gleize often took part in commemorative events with wreath-laying ceremonies, which take place at the memorial on May 8th as " Liberation Day ".
Honors
For his engagement in the resistance against the German occupation , Maurice Gleize received the French Order of Merit Croix de guerre with a silver star in 1952 and the Order of Honor in 1983 .
In 1984 a plaque was placed on Maurice Gleize's former printing works in Paris to commemorate the publication of the first edition of the France d'abord in September 1941 during the occupation. In 2008 the French town of Gournay-sur-Marne, where Gleize had lived since 1949, named a square after him.
In the city museum in Wolfsburg Castle is a concentration camp prisoner clothes by Maurice Gleize issued, which he originally the concentration camp memorial had provided Neuengamme.
In Wolfsburg, where Maurice Gleize was a prisoner in the Laagberg satellite camp from 1944 to 1945, the Remembrance and Future Association awards the “Maurice Gleize Prize for courageous and respectful action for human dignity”. The prize, endowed with 400 euros , was first awarded in 2015. He was given to a school in Rorien near Wolfsburg for putting up a memorial plaque at the children's camp in 2014.
Publications (books of poetry, autobiography)
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Web links
- Maurice Gleize . Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial - Open Archive, October 29, 2015 (pdf; 293 kB)
- Axel Porin: Plaque en hommage à l'imprimeur Maurice Gleize . From: La Résitance en Ile-de-France . AERI (Association pour des Etudes sur la Resistance intérieure), Paris, 2004. Reproduced on the website of the "Musée de la résistance en ligne" (French)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Une place en hommage au résistant Maurice Gleize . In: Le Parisien , November 10, 2008, accessed on February 11, 2018 (French).
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52965-8 , p. 554.
- ↑ Wolfsburg: Memorial and educational facility is to be built on Laagberg . In: Focus Online , May 9, 2017, accessed February 11, 2018.
- ↑ a b Wolfsburg - Respect and Courage: Price commemorates concentration camp inmates . In: Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung , August 30, 2013, accessed on February 11, 2018.
- ↑ Reinhard Jacobs: Terror under the swastika - places of remembrance in Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Study on behalf of the Otto Brenner Foundation . Otto Brenner Foundation, Berlin, 2001, p. 117, accessed on February 11, 2018 (pdf; 385 kB).
- ↑ For the memory of the children's camp . In: Gifhorner Rundschau , November 27, 2015; reproduced on the website of the “Wolfsburg Remembrance and Future Association”, accessed on February 11, 2018 (pdf; 224 kB).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gleize, Maurice |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French printer, poet, resistance fighter and surviving prisoner of the Laagberg satellite camp in what is now Wolfsburg |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 7, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nîmes |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 20, 2003 |
| Place of death | Gournay-sur-Marne |