Walter Bacher (resistance fighter)

Walter Bacher (born June 30, 1893 in Halle / Saale ; † after September 29, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a German social democratic resistance fighter against National Socialism and a teacher at the Hamburger Klosterschule and the Talmud Tora School .

Life

Walter Bacher passed the final examination at the municipal grammar school in Halle in 1911 and then studied Latin, Greek, history and archeology at the University of Halle and in Freiburg .

From 1914 to 1918 he took part in the First World War as a volunteer and was wounded in the process. After the war he continued his studies. He received his doctorate in 1919 with a thesis on De Pausaniae studiis Homericis . From 1919 to 1927 he was a teacher at various grammar schools in Merseburg and Berlin and also worked temporarily as a private tutor.

He became the youth secretary of the General Free Employees' Association and a member of the SPD . He was involved, among other things, in the socialist youth workers and in the social democratic people's home movement .

In 1927 he got a permanent job at a secondary school for girls, the monastery school in Hamburg. There he taught Latin, Greek, German and history. On his initiative, an old-language grammar school branch was set up. On July 2, 1929, he married his colleague Clara Haurwitz .

Stumbling block for Walter Bacher in front of the school yard of the monastery school Hamburg

In 1933 he was released from civil service. He took part in the social democratic resistance in Hamburg and was in contact with a resistance group that wrote anti-fascist leaflets and enabled people at risk to flee to Denmark. He refused to emigrate himself, later efforts to get out of Germany failed. In order to continue to have the opportunity to teach in the anti-fascist sense, he initially worked as a temporary worker at the Hamburg Talmud Tora School from 1935. He joined the Hamburg Jewish Community in 1935 . In 1938 he got a permanent position. “In the last few years of the Jewish school in Hamburg, Bacher was one of the few teachers with academic training who had not emigrated. He took on an extraordinary workload right up to the end under the most oppressive conditions in order to enable qualified scientific instruction in the upper school. ”In the early summer of 1942, Bacher and his family had to move into a“ Jewish house ”and on July 19, 1942 they were transferred to the Theresienstadt ghetto deported. From there on September 29, 1944, they went on a transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp .

Honors

• In memory of Walter and Clara Bacher, the Bacherweg in Hamburg-Niendorf was named after them. The memorial table with 12 chairs in Hamburg-Niendorf also includes them in the memorial.

literature

• Ursula Randt : The Talmud Tora School in Hamburg. Dölling and Galitz, Munich / Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937904-07-7 , p. 238.
• Barbara Brix: "Country, my country, how do I live out of you." Dr. Walter Bacher - Jew, Social Democrat, teacher at the convent school. Published by the Klosterschule grammar school. Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-930802-60-0 .

Web links

• Stumbling blocks Hamburg

Individual evidence

1. ↑ HaGalil's biography