Roland Lorent

Roland Cornelius Lorent (born March 12, 1920 in Cologne-Lindenthal ; † November 10, 1944 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Stumbling stone laid in memory of Roland Lorent in Cologne-Ehrenfeld, Keplerstrasse 21 .

Roland Lorent came from a working class family in Cologne . His father was a carpenter and a member of the SPD . After attending elementary school , Roland initially worked in an Ehrenfeld block ice company. Robert Lorent was a maladjusted youth and ran away from home several times. In 1935, his parents arranged for him to be placed in the Halfeshof care home in Solingen , where he stayed until 1936. He then learned the trade of carpenter and worked as a machine carpenter for several Cologne companies.

Roland Lorent was drafted into the flak in Iserlohn in August 1941 , but was released again because of a heart and stomach ailment. He lived with his girlfriend Anna Brenden with his parents on Eburonenstrasse in the Neustadt-Süd district of Cologne. His parents' house was bombed in an air raid on June 29, 1943, killing his girlfriend, their child and Robert Lorent's father. He then moved in with his new fiancée and lived with her and her illegitimate children at Keplerstrasse 21 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld.

In February 1944 Roland Lorent was drafted again to the flak. The house in Keplerstrasse was destroyed in a bomb attack on April 21, 1944, and Roland Lorent was given home leave to repair aircraft damage. After that he did not return to the troops. Since then he has lived illegally as a deserter in Cologne. In order to secure his increased alcohol consumption and his livelihood, he began to break in . In August 1944 he met Hans Balzer through his fiancée's half-brother. Balzer gained a strong influence over him and together they lived in an arbor in an allotment garden at Blücherpark . Both went on a successful thief tour together. On September 28, 1944, Hans Balzer donated the drunk Roland Lorent to the Cologne-Braunsfeld NSDAP local group leader Heinrich Soentgen on September 29, 1944 when he was riding home on his bike.

On September 30, 1944, together with Hans Steinbrück , they stole weapons and ammunition from a broken-open Wehrmacht vehicle in order to free Cilly Serve, Steinbrück's partner, who was arrested the day before, on October 1, 1944. This attempt turned into a wild shooting through Ehrenfeld, in which shots were fired at bystanders. In the early morning of October 3, 1944, an attempt to steal explosives from Fort X together with Hans Steinbrück also failed . In the late evening of October 3, 1944, Roland Lorent was tracked down by an army patrol during a break-in, very drunk and arrested for deserting.

The next day, Roland Lorent was brought to Brauweiler , where he was interrogated and tortured by Ferdinand Kütter's Gestapo command . Without a court ruling, Roland Lorent was hanged in public on the morning of November 10, 1944, along with twelve other members of the Steinbrück group in Hüttenstrasse in Cologne-Ehrenfeld .

Honor

• In front of his former home at Keplerstrasse 21 , Gunter Demnig laid a “ stumbling block ” in his memory.

literature

• Bernd-A. Rusinek : Society in the Catastrophe: Terror, Illegality, Resistance - Cologne 1944/45 , = Düsseldorfer Schriften zur recent regional history and the history of North Rhine-Westphalia 24; University thesis: Zugl .: Düsseldorf, Univ., Diss., 1988; Essen: Klartext-Verl., 1989, ISBN 3-88474-134-9 .
• Carla Steck (Ville-Gymnasium): Edelweiss pirates - resistance fighters or criminals? (Technical work, school) , ISBN 978-3-640-00374-7 (e-book).
• Winfried Seibert: The Cologne Controversy. Legend and facts about the Nazi crimes in Cologne-Ehrenfeld . Klartext, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8375-1235-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Brauweiler Memorial Book: Biography Lorent, Roland Cornelius , accessed on March 2, 2018
2. ↑ http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/vorschau/101974.html Retrieved August 11, 2011

Web links