Peter Kasper

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Peter Kasper (born March 17, 1907 in Krettnich near Wadern ; † March 14, 1939 in the Plötzensee correctional facility ) was a German resistance fighter who was executed during the Nazi era .

Life

Peter Kasper grew up as the youngest of nine siblings in an impoverished Catholic smallholder family. After the early death of both parents, he moved to Völklingen in 1922 , where he earned his living as a laborer. From 1932 he worked at the Petite-Rosselle mine as a cutter and tugboat . At the same time he attended business school . In 1928 he became a member of the Lorraine Mining Association, which was led by communists .

In the face of the global economic crisis he lost his job and first tried his luck in the worm area until he went to Amerikanka in the Donets Basin in 1931 . There he joined the CPSU and married a woman from Baesweiler who had also emigrated. In the party he offered training courses and edited the company newspaper Sturm auf Kohlen . In the winter of 1933/34 he took on Soviet citizenship. Long known as a political worker in Amerikanka, he began studying in August 1934 at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West in Moscow , a school of the Communist International .

After this cadre school was closed in 1936 and his marriage failed at the same time, he was faced with financial failure, returned to the German Reich and tried in vain to save his marriage. Since his return he has been under surveillance by the Gestapo , which had been informed of his activities as an agent of the Comintern. Nevertheless, he was initially able to act unmolested and got a job as a tusker in Aalen . There he got to know a communist circle made up of former KPD members. The circle, however, did not get beyond political discussions and listening to Radio Moscow .

Kasper was arrested on May 19, 1937. His co-conspirators were arrested a few days later. Through Kasper's activities in the Soviet Union, he was identified as a ringleader and sentenced to death in a three-day show trial. The Völkischer Beobachter reported intensively on the process. Kasper was branded as a traitor, as a "henchman 'in the service of the enemies of every culture and civilization, every order and every law, the Bolsheviks" ". The foreign press reported intensively on the case as an example of the "blood justice" of the Nazi regime.

On March 14, 1939 Kasper was executed with a guillotine in the Plötzensee correctional facility.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Gerhard Paul : The splintered no. Saarlanders against Hitler . Dietz, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-8012-5010-5 , p. 112 .