Werner Steinbrinck

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Werner Karl Otto Steinbrinck , in literature also spelled Steinbrink , (born April 19, 1917 in Berlin ; died August 18, 1942 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German anti-fascist resistance fighter who was sentenced to death by the Nazi regime and was executed.

Life

Steinbrinck came from a communist working-class family in Berlin-Neukölln . The father Karl was a worker, the mother Agnes a maid and seamstress. He first attended a communal elementary school and from 1931 to 1933 switched to the Neukölln Karl Marx School , a highly renowned reform pedagogical school where working-class children could also take their Abitur. There he was friends with the later historian Kurt Gossweiler and Herbert Ansbach . The three organized themselves in the Socialist Student Union (SSB), which was close to the KPD . They worked on the school newspaper Schulkampf , whose editor-in-chief had been Ansbach since 1932. At the school, Steinbrinck was noticed in the phase of their name deletion and their transition to a "Realgymnasium on a National Socialist basis" due to willingness to conflict with individual teachers. We know of an episode of an objection to a substitute teacher who was not prepared to accept evidence in an exchange conversation with the students. Steinbrück ignored him, went forward and provided the proof. He was unimpressed by the accusation of “cheeky arbitrariness”. After the forced dissolution of the SSB, the three friends joined the now banned Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD), Southeast sub-district, and took part in the German and European anti-fascist resistance .

Steinbrinck (nickname Steinchen ) hitchhiked to Paris in September for the first “World Congress of Youth Against War and Fascism” . The goals of the World Youth Committee as the organizing body included "the coordination of international anti-fascist actions and the organization of solidarity movements for those persecuted by fascism all over the world." In the summer of 1934 a second tour with this goal took place, this time with Kurt Gossweiler and two relatives the youth organization of the KPO, which crosses with the KPD . One took part in a second such "World Congress of Youth" and again it was about the organization of the resistance against the fascist regimes and movements in the whole of Europe and against the danger of war that goes with them. Steinbrinck was the only member of the group to take this opportunity to take part in the deliberations of the management of the KJVD in Paris. After the leading functionaries of the KJVD district were arrested in the waves of arrests against the left opposition groups, Herbert Ansbach and the Jewish comrade Herbert Baum took over the management, Werner Steinbrinck the editor-in-chief of an illegal newspaper. He was also involved in the so-called Böller-Aktion Berliner Studenten. Explosive objects in the form of wooden books filled with scattered labels had been detonated in the university, in the state library and in other places. In 1935, Werner Steinbrinck left the school before graduating from high school, which had meanwhile been brought into line and whose name had been taken from it, in order to do a laboratory assistant apprenticeship in a Jewish-run chemical-scientific laboratory. He later made up his Abitur at an evening school.

In 1936 he was arrested together with other anti-fascists, including his girlfriend Lisa Attenberger and Herbert Ansbach, and charged with preparing high treason . Attenberger had organized Marxist training circles, presumably together with Steinbrinck. In the absence of evidence, he had to be released again, while Attenberger, who had protected him, and Ansbach were sentenced to several years' imprisonment. Steinbrinck founded a resistance group at his workplace, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry . She was in contact with the resistance group around Herbert Baum. In 1939 Steinbrinck was drafted into the Reich Labor Service and the following year into the Wehrmacht . He was deployed within the OKW and was therefore able to stay in Berlin. In 1942 he was released from the Wehrmacht to study chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI). The clandestine cohesion of the groups and comrades was not abandoned; rather, it is said that it was strengthened by the apparent failure of the Wehrmacht outside Moscow . After Steinbrinck's involvement in an attack in May 1942 on the anti-communist propaganda exhibition The Soviet Paradise , for which, as a trained chemical technician , he procured a kilo of black powder and a flammable solution from his workplace , he and 22 others from his and Baum's group were arrested. The damage caused to the exhibition was minor, but the publicity of the attack made it unusually significant. He was sentenced to death and executed on August 18, 1942, along with his Jewish comrade and fiancée Hildegard Jadamowitz . A total of seven members of the Baum group and five of the Steinbrinck group were executed.

Honors

  • In 1981 the “anti-fascist resistance group” around Herbert Baum was placed a memorial stone by the magistrate of Berlin ( GDR ) who named Werner Steinbrinck as one of the members of the group. The sculptor was Jürgen Raue . After the fall of the Wall in 2000/2001, glass acrylic panels with extensive "additional information" were placed over the side of the stone reminding of the liberation of Berlin by the Red Army .
  • In 1983 the 24th Polytechnic High School in Berlin-Marzahn was named after Werner Steinbrinck. After the fall of the Wall , the name was deleted, and the school no longer exists.
  • In 1988 in Berlin-Marzahn, Franz-Stenzer-Strasse 41 / Zühlsdorfer Strasse 20-22 and thus near the school, a white marble stele was erected for Werner Steinbrinck , Hilde Jadamowitz and Herbert Baum, sculptor: Siegfried Wehrmeister .

Web links

Literature (selection)

  • Hanne Hiob : Fought for human rights , Berlin (GDR) 1958
  • Margot Pikarski: Youth in the Berlin Resistance , Berlin (GDR) 1978
  • Klaus Mammach: Resistance 1939-1945. History of the German anti-fascist resistance movement in Germany and in emigration , Berlin (GDR) 1987
  • Horst Taleikis / Wolfgang Teichmann: Action radio exhibition. Berlin students in the anti-fascist resistance in 1934. Memories in the new version by Wolfgang Teichmann , Berlin (GDR) 1988
  • Margot Pikarski / Elke Warning (ed.): Gestapo reports on the anti-fascist resistance struggle of the KPD from 1933 to 1945. September 1943 to early 1945 , Berlin (GDR) 1989
  • Karsten Borgmann / Wilfried Löhken / Werner Vathke: Jews in Resistance , Berlin 1993
  • Annette Leo, Peter Reif-Spirek: Polyphonic Silence , 2001
  • Regina Scheer : In the shadow of the stars. A Jewish resistance group. Berlin 2004.
  • Cora Ann Granata / Cheryl A. Koos (eds.): The Human Tradition in Modern Europe, 1750 to the Present , Lanham / Boulder / New York 2008
  • John M. Cox: Circles of Resistance. Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany , Berlin / New York / Paris et al. 2009
  • Eric Brothers: Berlin Ghetto. Herbert Baum and the Anti-Fascist Resistance , Gloucestershire (UK) 2012
  • Herbert Lindenberger: One Family's Shoah. Victimization, Resistance, Survival in Nazi Europe , New York 2013
  • Cristina Fischer : A forgotten hero , in: Junge Welt , May 18, 2017, pp. 12–13
  • Christiane Hoss and Martin Schönfeld (eds.): Memorial plaques in Berlin. Places of remembrance of those persecuted by National Socialism 1991–2001 (= series of publications of the Active Museum ; 9), Berlin 2002

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerd Radde / Werner Korthaase / Rudolf Rogler / Udo Gößwald (eds.): School reform - continuities and breaks. The test field Berlin-Neukölln 1912-1945 , Opladen 1993, passim.
  2. ↑ Doris Mischon-Vosselmann: The end of the Karl-Marx-Schule , in: Gerd Radde / Werner Korthaase / Rudolf Rogler / Udo Gößwald (eds.): School reform - continuities and breaks. The test field Berlin-Neukölln 1912-1945 , Opladen 1993, pp. 346–357, here: p. 355.
  3. ↑ Karl Heinz Jahnke , Murdered and extinguished: twelve German anti-fascists, Freiburg 1995, p. 21.
  4. ↑ Heinz Bergschicker, Olaf Groehler: D eutsche Chronik, 1933-1945. Everyday Life in Fascism , West Berlin 1983, p. 156.
  5. ↑ A rchive for the history of resistance and work , Vol. 14, 1996, p. 209.
  6. ↑ Kurt Gossweiler: The first three years in the "Thousand Year Reich" , see: HP Kurt Gossweiler, [1] , also in: Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz (eds.): Europe before the abyss - The year 1935 - The historian Manfred Weißbecker zum Sevzigsten , Cologne, 2005, pp. 146–155.
  7. ↑ Hanne Hiob : Fighting human rights , Berlin (GDR) 1958, p. 553.
  8. ^ Germania Judaica, Cologne Library for the History of German Judaism, Volume 27–30, Cologne 1969, p. 116.
  9. ↑ Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.): The Routledge History of the Holocaust , London / New York 2012, p. 330.
  10. ↑ Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.): The Routledge History of the Holocaust , London / New York 2012, p. 330.
  11. ↑ Unless otherwise stated: Christina Fischer: Ein vergerer Held , in: Junge Welt , May 18, 2017, pp. 12-13.
  12. ↑ Regina Scheer: In the shadow of the stars. A Jewish resistance group , Berlin 2004, p. 192.
  13. ↑ [2] .
  14. ^ Directory of the Marzahn-Hellersdorf District Museum , as of September 2017
  15. ↑ Unless otherwise stated: Christina Fischer: Ein vergerer Held , in: Junge Welt , May 18, 2017, pp. 12-13.
personal data
SURNAME Steinbrinck, Werner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinbrinck, Werner Karl Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist resistance fighter against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 18, 1942
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee