Otto Hermann Hampel

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Elise and Otto Hampel

Otto Hermann Hampel , (born June 21, 1897 in Mühlbock , † April 8, 1943 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism . He had been married to the resistance fighter Elise Hampel since January 23, 1937 .

resistance

After the First World War, Otto Hampel worked in the Siemens-Schuckert cable factory in Berlin . From 1928 to 1933 he was a member of the Stahlhelm . When his brother-in-law fell during the campaign in the west against France, the couple became opponents of the regime. The couple lived at Amsterdamer Strasse 10 in the working-class district of Wedding . Between September 1940 and September 1942 they wrote postcards and around 200 leaflets in which they called for resistance to National Socialism and to hinder the planning of war, and which they put down in stairwells, mostly around their apartment in Berlin-Wedding. Almost all of the couple's postcards were immediately given to the police or the Gestapo by the finders . Despite the investigation, it took two years for the authors to be caught on the basis of a report by an informer , Gertrude Waschke.

After being betrayed, the Hampels were arrested on October 20, 1942. On January 22, 1943 were from the 2nd Division of the People's Court for " undermining military force " and "preparation for high treason " sentenced to death and on April 8, 1943 Plötzensee executed .

  • postcard

  • postcard

Commemoration

The fate of the Hampels became the model for Hans Fallada's novel Everyone dies for himself in 1947 . The events of the novel roughly follow the trial files researched by Fallada, which he had received from Johannes R. Becher for this purpose.

On April 8, 1989, the pictured memorial plaque for the couple was attached to the post-war building at Amsterdamer Strasse 10 in the Berlin district of Wedding ; the original home of the Hampels had been destroyed by an aerial bomb.

Efforts to name the forecourt of the Wedding Town Hall after the Hampel couple failed in 2016. In April 2018, the section of Limburger Straße between Genter Straße and Müllerstraße, which runs past the town hall canteen as a pedestrian path, was named after Elise and Otto Hampel. On July 21, 2018, a memorial stele for the couple was inaugurated on the forecourt of the Wedding Town Hall.

literature

  • Hans Fallada: Everyone dies for himself alone. , Roman, 1947 (Unabridged original edition: Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-351-03349-1 )
  • Manfred Kuhnke: Fallada's last novel - The true story. Steffen Verlag, Friedland 2011, ISBN 978-3-941683-10-5

Web links

Commons : Otto Hermann Hampel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Andreas Mix: The guillotine also destroyed their marriage . Hans Fallada's novel “Everyone dies for himself” has a true role model: the story of Elise and Otto Hampel, who distributed papers against the Nazis. In: Magazine of the Berliner Zeitung number 112 from 14./15. May 2011 . S. 8 .
  2. ↑ Honor for resistance against Nazis fails due to bureaucracy at tagesspiegel.de, accessed on November 14, 2017
  3. ^ Laura Hofmann: Memorial stele in Berlin-Wedding. "The stele commemorates the courage of this couple". In: tagesspiegel.de . July 18, 2018, accessed July 23, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Hampel, Otto Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hampel, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighters against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Millbuck
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1943
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee