Michael Schnabrich

Michael Schnabrich

Michael Schnabrich (born August 6, 1880 in Stadtsteinach ; † October 9, 1939 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was a German politician ( SPD ) and a member of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic . He died during the Nazi regime in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen .

Life

Schnabrich grew up in poor conditions in the Upper Franconian municipality of Stadtsteinach , his father was a forest worker and day laborer. After his school days (1886-1894) he completed an apprenticeship as a shoemaker in Kulmbach from 1894 to 1897 . From 1897 onwards, Schnabrich spent his traveling years in Switzerland, France, Belgium and Germany. In 1899 he joined the SPD and the Central Association of Shoemakers in Weißenfels . Just a year later he was chairman of the local social democratic association. In Weißenfels he also married his wife Emma, ​​née Dabelow. The couple had two sons and a daughter.

Schnabrich worked as a shoemaker until 1906, interrupted by two years of military service from 1902 to 1904. In 1906 he became a full-time secretary of the shoemaker's union in Wermelskirchen . In 1909 he moved to Frankfurt am Main to work for the shoemaker's association . In 1911 the local SPD association in Hersfeld offered him the candidacy for the Hersfeld- Hünfeld - Rotenburg constituency . Given the rural structure of the constituency, he achieved considerable success; the holder of the mandate, the anti-Semite Ludwig Werner , was only able to defend the constituency in the second round of elections. Schnabrich remained in party work after the election defeat, from 1913 to 1919 he was party secretary in Hanau . This was interrupted by his military service in World War I , from which he returned with the Iron Cross second class , but also with a gas injury as a war disabled.

In 1919 Schnabrich returned to Hersfeld , now as Secretary of the ADGB . Soon he was also involved in local politics, from 1921 to 1924 and from 1925 to 1926 he was a city councilor, then a district councilor in the Hersfeld district . From 1919 to 1926 he represented the SPD in the Kassel municipal parliament and the provincial parliament of the Hesse-Nassau province . In the Reichstag election in May 1924 , he won a seat in constituency 19, Hessen-Nassau . He remained a member of the Reichstag until 1933. In April 1932, Schnabrich was one of the few Social Democrats in the Reichstag parliamentary group to consider including the NSDAP in coalitions within which the party would demonstrate its ineptitude, given its strength. The reason for this was that the SPD had lost a lot of approval in Prussia.

Schnabrich caused a sensation in Hersfeld when, in 1919, together with the factory owner Fritz Rechberg, he launched a building association for self-help in view of the housing shortage that had raged after the war. Such a collaboration between “capital” and “labor” was unusual at the time - the socialist laws of the empire were only a few years ago - and brought Schnabrich a lot of criticism.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Schnabrich retired into private life. He moved to live with his daughter in Kassel after he was taken into “ protective custody ” in Kassel in spring 1933 for six weeks . In order to secure his livelihood, he bought a cinema with the proceeds of his Hersfeld house in Kassel, which he ran with his family.

Michael Schnabrich's grave in the main cemetery in Kassel

At the beginning of the Second World War , Schnabrich was arrested again on September 1, 1939 as part of the war special and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in mid-September. There, having had a heart condition for years, he was so abused by the guard Wilhelm Schubert by kicking him in the abdomen that he died of the consequences on October 9, 1939. He had previously been denied medical treatment in the concentration camp. In 1959 Schubert was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Bonn district court .

Commemoration

Memorial plaques on the Reichstag

Streets in Bad Hersfeld and Kassel as well as the house of the SPD office in the district of Hersfeld-Rotenburg are named after Schnabrich . Since 1992 one of the 96 memorial plaques for members of the Reichstag murdered by the National Socialists has been commemorating Schnabrich near the Reichstag in Berlin .

literature

• Jochen Lengemann : MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , p. 339.
• Danny Michelsen: Michael Schnabrich (1880-1939). In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Trade unionists in the Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Biographical Handbook, Volume 4 (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 6). Metropol, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-148-3 , pp. 177-192.
• Michael Schnabrich . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Deceased personalities . Vol. 1. JHW Dietz Nachf., Hannover 1960, p. 268.
• Dieter Pelda: The members of the Prussian Communal Parliament in Kassel 1867-1933 (= Prehistory and history of parliamentarism in Hesse. Vol. 22 = Publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 8). Elwert, Marburg 1999, ISBN 3-7708-1129-1 , p. 188.
• Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Michael Schnabrich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Michael Schnabrich in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Mein Heimatland , Vol. 44, No. 8, August 2005, p. 31. Extensive résumé of Schnabrich in the Hersfelder Zeitung ( PDF file; 802 kB ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
• Schnabrich, Michael. Hessian biography. (As of October 9, 2019). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jochen Lengemann: MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , p. 339.
2. ↑ Schumacher, MdR , p. 502.
3. ↑ Summary ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. the trial of justice and Nazi crimes . 
4. ^ Report on the renaming of the office in Osthessen-News.