Suzanne Wesse

Suzanne Wesse , née Suzanne Vasseur , (born January 16, 1914 in Calais , France; † August 18, 1942 in Plötzensee prison , Berlin ) was a French resistance fighter against National Socialism and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Live and act

Stumbling block at the house, Leibnizstrasse 72, in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Vasseur was the daughter of an industrialist who owned a curtain factory in Calais. In her youth she attended schools in England, Spain and Berlin. In 1934 she worked in a Jewish textile company in Berlin, where she met the engineer Richard Wesse. After a temporary return to France, the two married in Berlin in 1936. Their daughter Katharina was born in April 1937.

Until 1937 Wesse worked as a freelance translator for various magazines in Berlin. In the same year, through the mediation of Felix Heymann , a cousin of her husband, she joined the communist-oriented circle of friends around Herbert Baum . During the Second World War , she took part in actions to combat Nazi rule from within with the resistance group organized by Baum. Wesse took on the task of making matrices for the reproduction of propaganda posters and brochures directed against National Socialism and the war, for which she was given the opportunity to work as a secretary in an administrative office. She also used her language skills to establish contact with Belgian and French prisoners of war and forced laborers in Berlin and to exchange information and illegal printed material with them. She also used them to organize fake IDs with which members of the Baum group should be able, in an emergency, to lead a life of illegality under false identities.

On May 18, 1942, Wesse took part in an arson attack organized by the Baum group on the anti-Soviet propaganda exhibition “The Soviet Paradise” in Berlin's Lustgarten. Together with Baum, his wife, Hans Joachim , Sala Kochmann , Gerd Meyer and Irene Walter, she visited the exhibition, where they hid various explosives and combustible material. Parts of the exhibition were destroyed in the resulting fire, but the fire brigade was soon able to contain and extinguish the fire. The assassins escaped unmolested from the exhibition pavilion.

When Baum's group was broken up by the Secret State Police in the following days , Wesse and her husband were arrested on May 23, 1942. While Richard Wesse was set free again after three weeks, Suzanne Wesse was convicted of involvement in the attack on May 18 and charged before Special Court V for undermining military strength . On July 16, 1942, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. The execution of the sentence followed on August 18, 1942 in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison.

Wesse's husband was forced to work for the Siemens group until the end of the war.

Today, a memorial stone erected behind the administration buildings and the mourning hall at the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery (entrance: Markus-Reich-Platz) commemorates Wesse and the other members of the Baum group.

On May 17, 2017 , a stumbling block was laid in front of her former place of residence, Berlin-Charlottenburg , Leibnizstraße 72 .

literature

• Karsten Borgmann / Wilfried Löhken / Werner Vathke: Jews in Resistance , 1993.
• Christiane Hoss / Martin Schönfeld / Marion Neumann: Memorial plaques in Berlin: Places of remembrance of those persecuted by National Socialism, 1991-2001 , 2002, p. 131.
• Konrad Kwoet / Helmut Eschwege: Self-assertion and resistance: German Jews in the struggle for existence and human dignity, 1933-1945 , 1984.
• Margot Pikarski: Youth in the Berlin Resistance , 1978, p. 156.
• Regina Scheer : In the shadow of the stars. A Jewish resistance group. 2004.

Web links

Commons : Suzanne Wesse  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Representation of the Baum group with a short biography of Suzanne Wesse in the Jewish Women Archives

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.gedenkenafeln-in-berlin.de/nc/gedenkenafeln/gedenkenafel-beispiel/tid/widerstandskaempfer-14/