Otto House

Memorial event in Frankfurt
Newspaper clipping, FR, August 1, 1945

Stumbling stone in front of Bindingstrasse 9 for Otto Häuslein

House Bindingstrasse 9

Otto Oskar Hermann Häuslein (born January 3, 1911 ; † September 17, 1942 in the Preungesheim prison , Frankfurt am Main ) was a German plumber and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Live and act

After attending school, Häuslein worked as a plumber. In 1926 he joined the union youth movement.

Politically, Häuslein made contact with the communists at the end of the 1920s. Around 1930 he became youth leader of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) in the north end of Frankfurt.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Häuslein was taken into protective custody as the communist organizations in Germany were broken up. He was released again in the fall. Although on the occasion of his release from prison he had to undertake to abstain from any political activity in the future, from 1934 he again maintained contacts with supporters of the Communist Party (KPD) who were striving to overcome the National Socialist system.

In 1937 Häuslein came into contact with the former KPD functionary Adam Leis : After the beginning of the Second World War , he joined a group that Leis had built up and operated underground, which pursued the goal of subversive work against the National Socialist state and war machine Weakening and ultimately contributing to the collapse of the same by, so to speak, the efforts of the Allied powers - and among them the Soviet Union in particular - to overthrow the Hitler dictatorship, which from this point of view represented the "outer" front in the fight against Nazism to supplement an “internal” front that would help achieve the goals mentioned by taking measures against the regime within German territory.

In practice, the work of the group consisted primarily of distributing handouts and leaflets directed against the Nazi system as well as reports from broadcasts from foreign radio stations that had been tapped secretly. This activity was interrupted in the case of Häuslein by the compulsory service in the military from February to November 1940, during which he u. a. was used in France.

In the summer of 1941, Häuslein was arrested along with most of his like-minded people in the course of the break-up of the group around Leis. Together with Leis, Anton Breitinger , Edmund German , Karl Götting , Wilhelm Hugo , Wilhelm Klöppinger and Julius Nees , he was finally charged with preparing for high treason before the People's Court. As the indictment stated, he continued “from 1934 to 1941 [...] jointly with others to prepare the treasonable undertaking to change the constitution of the empire by force [...] whereby the act aimed at influencing the masses through the distribution of writings [...] was judged. ”The court found the seven defendants guilty on June 26, 1942 and imposed the death penalty. In the grounds of the judgment against Leis and Häuslein it was stated:

“The German people have entered into a battle of fate. The outcome of this war will be decisive for whether there will be a national community at all in the future, and whether there will be a German culture at all. In this fight, therefore, the homeland must stand united behind the front. Any German who tries to undermine this unity and to build a front behind the fighting troops is a traitor to the German people and must be treated as such. The two defendants both intended such betrayal. They knew that only a lost war could help the communist movement in Germany to succeed. They therefore hoped for the German collapse and worked towards it through their disruptive activity, because the communist idea was higher than the German people. That is why the healthy public sentiment demands that the heaviest punishment that the law allows is imposed on them. "

After a petition for clemency was rejected, the judgments against Häuslein and his six co-defendants in the Preungesheim prison were carried out with the guillotine . The corpses were given to the Anatomical Institute in Giessen for research purposes.

Criminal proceedings initiated at the instigation of Leis' widow in February 1958 against the Wuppertal public prosecutor Bruchhaus, who in 1941 as Reich attorney had demanded the death sentences in the proceedings against Leis, Häuslein and the other five men as a representative of the public prosecutor's office, was discontinued in July 1958.

Häuslein was married and had two sons.

Today a stumbling block in front of Häuslein's last house in Frankfurt reminds of his fate.

literature

• Franz Neuland, Albrecht Werner-Cordt: The Young Guard: Workers' Youth Movement in Frankfurt am Main 1904–1945. Anabas, Giessen 1980, p. 243f.
• Armin Schmid: Frankfurt in the firestorm: The history of the city in World War II. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984.

Web links

• Short biography of Häuslein on the website of the City of Frankfurt, accessed on Feb. 22, 2020