Speyer camaraderie

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Speyer Comradeship was the name of a resistance group in the Speyer / Vorderpfalz area during the National Socialist era .

In autumn 1942 a group of anti-fascists was formed, which initially set itself the goal of supporting the family of the arrested communist leader Ernst Thälmann and also pursued plans to liberate Thälmann by force. Central people were the former Social Democrat Jakob Schultheis from Speyer, Wilhelm Kreutz from Berghausen , the Waldsee Stanislaus Peplinski and Elise Rohr (née Tremmel), the partner of the resistance fighter Johannes Zieger , who was forcibly recruited to the Penal Division 999 .

Soon, this group also established conspiratorial contacts with Polish and Soviet prisoners of war and civilian forced laborers in the Speyer region. In Waldsee / Palatinate , the restaurant "Zur Pfalz" served as a meeting point for the "Eastern workers" and Poles from the region, where political information was also passed on.

In the spring of 1944 the Gestapo succeeded in sending an informer to the von Thälmann family in Hamburg. It was through him that the Speyer comradeship was uncovered, which led to the arrest of a large number of the members and, at the same time, at least four "Eastern workers" from the aircraft factory in Saarpfalz . On February 9, 1945 the trial of Jakob Schultheis, his wife and eight other members of the Speyer comradeship, including Peplinski and Kreutz, began in Potsdam . Schultheis and Peplinski were executed on March 19, 1945 in the Brandenburg penitentiary . Wilhelm Kreutz did not survive the Nazi regime either. Shortly before the end of the war, the SS "liquidated" him on a transport with other political prisoners . The widow Emma Schultheis was freed by the Red Army in the Brandenburg penitentiary . Nothing is known about the further fate of the Soviet women who were picked up by the Gestapo.

literature

  • Hedwig Brüchert: Forced Labor 1939–1945 - the “labor deployment” of civilian forced laborers in the regions of what is now the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. City Archives. Wiesbaden 2003 (= Writings of the Wiesbaden City Archives, 8). ISBN 3-9802906-9-7 .
  • Klaus J. Becker: It is good that there are trade unions in Germany in Lothar Plogsties (ed.): The ÖTV district administration Ludwigshafen-Speyer-Frankenthal .
  • Hermann W. Morweiser: From the anti-fascist resistance in Speyer . VVN Association of Antifascists. Speyer 1983.
  • Michael Schepua: National Socialism in the Palatinate Province: Rule practice and everyday life in the communities of today's Ludwigshafen district 1933-1945 . Mannheim historical research. Vol. 20. Mannheim 2000. ISBN 3-920671-40-6 .
  • Final report of the Gestapo Neustadt ad Wstr. dated July 7, 1944 in LA SP: H91-6306.