Nicholas water

Nikolaus Wasser (born September 22, 1906 in Bonn , † July 28, 1973 in Berlin ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism . He survived the Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

Childhood and youth

Nikolaus Wasser was the son of Matthias and Josefine Wasser, geb. Heinen. His father was a china turner. He was the third of six children and the only boy in the strictly Catholic family. He spent his childhood in poor and hardship. At the age of six he had to contribute to the family's livelihood on a farm. Wasser attended elementary school in Kessenich for eight years and then trained as a moulder from an uncle in a foundry in Dottendorf .

Party and organization affiliation

During his training, Wasser joined the metalworkers union and became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth . In 1922 he joined the Communist Youth Association . In the course of the political struggles in the Weimar Republic , Wasser led a group of five members of the illegal Red Front Fighters' League , which was supposed to protect officials and assemblies with weapons against attacks.

Seizure of power and "protective custody"

A few weeks after the takeover of the NSDAP water was arrested and transported to the Emsland. There he spent the second half of 1933 in “protective custody” in the Börgermoor concentration camp and was called upon to do the heaviest moor work.

Condemnation and concentration camp

After his release, Nikolaus Wasser joined the resistance, headed the KPD cell in Bonn-Süd and lived in illegality. In 1935 he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured several times by the Gestapo in Cologne's Krebsgasse until he was convicted by the Hamm Higher Regional Court . In his memoirs he reported cruel abuse and named three of his four torturers: Trierweiler, Hoegen and Brodesser. The fourth was probably the Cologne Gestapo secretary Kütter.

In May 1936, Nikolaus Wasser was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. He spent his imprisonment in Siegburg prison until 1942 , when he was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He stayed there until the camp was evacuated by the SS in 1945.

After the war

Nikolaus Wasser met Käthe Schiftan after the war. The couple married in 1948 and had one daughter. Because of his bad health from the concentration camp, water could no longer practice his old profession as a shaper. He worked in East Berlin as a warehouse and branch manager and from 1952 as a training manager for the trade organization (HO). In 1963, water was given early retirement due to health problems. He died in Berlin in 1973 after double pneumonia .

Autobiography

• Horst Pierre-Bothien (Ed.): Bonn communist and resistance fighter. Memories (1906 - 1945) , Stadtmuseum Bonn, 1999, ISBN 978-3-931878-09-2 .

literature

• Josef Niesen : Bonn's dark past: perpetrators, victims and resisters. Politically motivated resistance . In: Bönn's story and stories . Bonn BuchVerlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-9818821-2-4 , pp. 321-323 .
• Horst-Pierre Bothien (Ed.): Nikolaus Wasser. Bonn communist and resistance fighter. Memories (1906–1945) . Stadtmuseum Bonn , Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-931878-09-0 .

Web links

• Bonn citizens in contrast to National Socialism (memorial site of the city of Bonn)
• Literature by and about Nikolaus Wasser in the catalog of the German National Library