Michael Rodenstock

Michael Rodenstock (born March 11, 1883 in Ilberstädt ; † May 2, 1933 in Duisburg ) was a German trade unionist.

Live and act

After attending school, Rodenstock learned the blacksmith's trade from 1899 to 1903. During his apprenticeship he began to get involved in the SPD and in the trade union movement - initially in the German Metal Workers' Association  - in which he later took on a number of functionaries. On his wanderings he came to Duisburg in 1906 , where he found a job as a tool fitter and got married.

In the First World War, Rodenstock did not take part as "indispensable". When the SPD split during the war, Rodenstock joined the USPD , for which he was a member of a workers' council from 1918 . In 1919 he switched to the KPD , for which he had been a member of the Duisburg city council from 1919. Around 1920 he became a member of the community and state workers' association . As an opponent of the Stalinist course of the KPD leadership, Rodenstock returned to the SPD in 1925, for which he became 1st chairman of the SPD local association and chairman of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold in the Duisburg district of Wanheimerort. Furthermore, Rodenstock was secretary of the general association of employees in public companies.

A few weeks after the National Socialists came to power in spring 1933, Rodenstock was arrested by members of the SA in his apartment in Wanheimerort on May 2, 1933 and taken to the basement of the building of the Free Trade Union at 11 Ruhrorterstraße, which was used as a temporary prison. There he was beaten to death together with three other trade unionists (Julius Birk, Emil Rentmeister and Johann Schlösser) after severe abuse. In order to cover up the act, the dead were first buried in the Hünxer Wald near Dinslaken and the rumor started that the men had gone abroad with union money. In order to maintain the certificate, Rodenstock was also served a fictitious notice of termination of his employment relationship. The corpses of Rodenstock and the other three men were only found by chance on May 21, 1934 by walkers and were buried in the Dinslaken cemetery.

The house in which the local SPD association Wanheimerort has its offices has been called Michael-Rodenstock-Haus since August 29, 2009 , to commemorate Rodenstock's “commitment to democracy up to his murder by the National Socialists”. Furthermore, a sculpture created in 1984 by the sculptor Hede Bühl in the form of a bound human torso, which is located on Burgplatz in front of the Duisburg town hall, and a sculpture created in 2004 by Dani Karavan, which stands in front of the Duisburg trade union building, remind of Rodenstock and the other three union secretaries.

literature

• Social Democratic Party of Germany: Committed to freedom. Commemorative Book of German Social Democracy in the 20th Century , 2000, p. 272.

Web links

• Short biography of Rodenstock at the SPD Duisburg