Max Ingberg

Max Ingberg (born November 8, 1904 in Warsaw , † March 24, 1983 in Minden ) was a German SPD politician , resistance fighter in the Third Reich and chairman of the Jewish community in Minden.

biography

Max Ingberg was born in November 1904 as the sixth of seven children of a Jewish Hasidic family in Warsaw, Poland. He visited the Cheder and came to Minden in Westphalia with his family at the age of nine . His father worked as a merchant in Minden and ran a shoe and clothing shop. After attending middle school, Max Ingberg completed an apprenticeship as a businessman in his father's shop. At the age of 21, Ingberg started his own business and traded haberdashery and textile goods at trade fairs and markets.

Ingberg had already joined the Socialist Youth Workers at the age of 14 and had been a member of the SPD in the Minden local association since 1924. He was also a member of the Reichsbanner and was its youth leader in the Minden district until the end of January 1933.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Ingberg was banned from practicing his profession, and he was no longer allowed to participate in trade fairs and markets. In February 1933 he was arrested on the street in Minden by members of the SA . He was then held in so-called protective custody in prisons in Herford and Minden . During his imprisonment, imprisoned Social Democrats expressed solidarity with their fellow Communist prisoners in May 1933. After the communists felled the newly planted so-called " Hitler oak " in Lerbeck after the May festivities in 1933 , the imprisoned communists in Herford prison were punished with food deprivation. The imprisoned Social Democrats, including Max Ingberg, responded with a hunger strike. After he was released from the police prison in Minden in August 1933, Ingberg fled from the Nazis to Belgium .

In exile in Belgium, Ingberg quickly rose to become one of the leading figures in the Sopade and formed the board of directors in the Belgian capital, Brussels, together with Reichstag deputies Gustav Ferl and Walter Tham , until the German attack on Belgium . Like Gustav Ferl, he was probably a border secretary of the Sopade, since shortly after his emigration he was supplying the Social Democrats remaining in the Minden region with leaflets and information; this was a typical task of the Sopade border secretariats. After Germany's invasion of Belgium on May 10, 1940, the Social Democrats in Belgium ceased their official work and fled abroad or went underground and took part in the resistance . Max Ingberg chose the path to resistance in Belgium and went into hiding under the name of "Pierre van Grimberg" with a forged passport as head of security. This passport saved him from arrest in 1942.

While he was underground, Ingberg was a member of the illegal Belgian Socialist Party. Max Ingberg's father, Hirsch Ingberg, died in Poland after he and his family were deported in 1938 in the “ Polenaktion ” . The exact circumstances of his death are unclear; he was probably murdered in the ghetto or in Otwock . Max Ingberg's stepmother Soscha (* 1886) and Hirsch Ingberg's second wife and Max Ingberg's three half-siblings, Moritz (* 1921), David (* 1926) and Erika (* 1928) were either killed in the Warsaw ghetto or were in a concentration camp Auschwitz murdered. The Minden Peace Week dedicated the first stumbling blocks in Minden to the murdered members of the Ingberg family . Hirsch Ingberg's older children, including Max, were able to avoid being murdered by the National Socialists by fleeing abroad (USA, Brazil and Belgium). After Belgium was evacuated by German troops in September 1944, the Social Democrats who remained in Belgium acted again as official representatives of their party. First of all, the later Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Heinz Kühn, took over the leadership role and later Walter Tham. After Tham was appointed party secretary of the SPD in Braunschweig , Max Ingberg, according to his own information, took over the official representation of the SPD in Belgium. In 1951 Max Ingberg returned to Minden and opened a shoe shop in Simeonstrasse; before the war his father's business was also located there.

Max Ingberg quickly rose to become one of the leading figures in the Minden SPD; his business premises on Simeonstrasse developed into an important point of contact for the Minden Social Democrats, and from then on, the development of the city and the SPD were significantly influenced in its back rooms. This is also confirmed by the then NRW correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Gerd Kröncke , in a portrait of Max Ingberg in 1982, in which he mentions the talks about the successor to Friedrich Schonhofen as member of the Bundestag and the election of Lothar Ibrügger as his successor. For many years Ingberg was the treasurer of the SPD local club in Minden and later its honorary chairman and "gray eminence". In addition to the offices at local club level, he was also a member of the sub-district executive committee of the SPD in Minden-Lübbecke . Minden's mayor and member of the state parliament Werner Pohle , who actually lived with his family in Vlotho , was also officially registered in Max Ingberg's house . Together with the local association chairman Wilhelm Ohlemeyer and Minden's mayor Werner Pohle, Ingberg formed the leading trio of the SPD in Minden in the 1950s and 1960s; Ingberg also had a strong influence on the future mayor Hans-Jürgen Rathert . At the end of the 1950s, Ingberg had to answer in court. In the course of a serious conflict within the SPD in Minden, in which he was actually not directly involved, he was accused of having fought against Germans with gun in hand during his time in the resistance in Belgium. After a two-day trial before the Minden jury and the hearing of 21 witnesses, he was acquitted on all points.

After the war, Max Ingberg also reestablished the Jewish community in Minden and was its chairman. He was also largely responsible for the construction of the Minden synagogue on Kampstrasse. On March 25, 1983, Max Ingberg died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 78 in the office of his shop on Simeonstrasse. An obituary in the Mindener Tageblatt described him as an “institution in this city” and the then North Rhine-Westphalian Minister Friedhelm Farthmann (SPD) also attended his burial in the Jewish cemetery .

Max-Ingberg-Platz in Minden / Westf. (2015)

literature

• Dirks, H.-W .; Kossack, K .: Politics made with a sure instinct. In: Mindener Tageblatt of March 21, 2008 on the 25th anniversary of Max Ingberg's death.
• Dirks, H.-W .; Kossack, K .: "Monsieur Max" from Minden in the resistance against Nazi Germany. In Mindener Tageblatt of March 21, 2008 on the 25th anniversary of Max Ingberg's death.
• Kröncke, G .: Always stand upright - A German résumé. In Wolfgang Emer u. a. (Ed.) Province under the swastika. Dictatorship and resistance in Ostwestfalen-Lippe. Bielefeld 1984: p. 281 ff.
• No homeless journeymen . Contributions to the history of social democracy in Minden , published in Minden in 1994 by Dr. Joachim Meynert and Ursula Bender-Wittmann.