Otto Schmirgal

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Otto Schmirgal (born December 15, 1900 in Bentschen , Meseritz district ( Posen province ); † October 24, 1944 in Brandenburg an der Havel ) was a worker, politician ( KPD ) and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Otto Schmirgal, son of a railroad conductor, was a trained blacksmith. After Bentschen became a border town on the Polish side as a result of the Peace Treaty of Versailles , he had to flee with his mother and four smaller siblings at the age of eighteen. She ended up in Reppen . He worked there first on the railroad, later as an enamel burner. As a unionized metal worker, he was elected to the works council. Therefore, when the opportunity arose, he was the first to be released. The same fate befell him at two companies in Küstrin and Thuringia. In 1924 he finally moved to Berlin.

Here he became a member of the KPD in 1925. Here, too, he was fired several times for political or trade union reasons. Since 1927 he was employed in the tram. Here he was soon re-elected to the works council. After the union split, he joined the RGO . In 1929 the Berliner Verkehrsgesellschaft (BVG) came into being as a merger of the urban subway, tram and bus lines. In 1932 Schmirgal was involved in the preparation and implementation of the Berlin BVG strike . He was a member of the strike leadership, in which several National Socialists from the NSBO were represented. Schmirgal was the main speaker at the meetings, according to the minutes of the police taking notes. When Schmirgal and two other strike leaders went to negotiate at the BVG headquarters on November 5, they were arrested.

In March 1933 he was elected as a member of the Prussian state parliament for the KPD , but was unable to exercise his mandate due to the incipient persecution by the National Socialists. Schmirgal went underground, but was arrested for the first time in August 1933 for anti-fascist activity and imprisoned in the Columbiahaus concentration camp . He was then in " protective custody " in the Brandenburg prison and in the Esterwegen concentration camp . After his release in September 1934 he worked as an emergency worker in the construction of the motorway and from 1937 as a cylindrical grinder at the Friedrichshafen gear factory in Wittenau . After Georg Elser's failed assassination attempt on Hitler in Munich in 1939, he was taken back into protective custody for some time without giving any special reason . During the Second World War he worked in the anti-fascist group around Robert Uhrig . He was head of the cell in the gear factory in Wittenau. He was arrested again on February 4, 1942, this time on the pretext of "systematic disruption of war production". He was imprisoned in the Moabit cell prison , where he met Werner Seelenbinder , then in the Wuhlheide labor education camp , from where he was sent to the Großbeeren labor education camp . On September 5, 1944, he was sentenced to death by the 5th Senate of the People's Court with Werner Seelenbinder, Hans Zoschke and ten other defendants for “communist party work” and executed in the Brandenburg prison.

Honors

tomb
  • Otto Schmirgal's grave of honor is located in the municipal urn cemetery Seestrasse in Berlin-Wedding .
  • A street in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg was named after Schmirgal in 1962 .
  • Until 1990 there was an FDGB vacation home in the Baltic resort of Zinnowitz , which was also named after him.
  • Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a plaque in the vestibule of the BVG building on Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse at the corner of Dircksenstrasse, commemorating the resistance fighters Otto Schmirgal and Albert Kayser . She is missing.
  • There is now a new memorial plaque in the entrance area of ​​the BVG headquarters, Holzmarktstrasse 15.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto-Schmirgal-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  2. ^ Photo of the memorial plaque in the German Digital Library
  3. ↑ Memorial plaque for Albert Kayser and Otto Schmirgal on www.gedenkenafeln-in-berlin.de
personal data
SURNAME Schmirgal, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD) and resistance fighters against the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Bentschen , Meseritz District (Poznan Province)
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1944
Place of death Brandenburg on the Havel