Wilhelm Trapp (resistance fighter)

Wilhelm Trapp (born July 4, 1906 in Saarbrücken ; † January 9, 1974 there ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism and an interbrigadist .

Life

Wilhelm Trapp attended elementary school and then became a taxi driver with his own business in Alt-Saarbrücken . There he got to know professional colleagues from the Red Front Fighter League, including Karl Merkel and Max Kleinbauer . In 1930 he married Maria Lenz, Fritz Lenz's sister, and joined the KPD in 1931 . In the voting campaign for the Saar area, he was, according to information from senior government councilor Richard Binder, to the “inner party's executive committee”. He is said to have smuggled communist materials such as leaflets, pamphlets and newspapers into the German Reich in his taxi .

In 1934 he gave shelter to the fugitive communist Rudolf Engel . Together with him, he published the magazine Sturm , which was aimed at disappointed SA men after the Röhm putsch . After the Saar was annexed to the German Reich, Trapp and his family went into exile in France. There he tried unsuccessfully to establish himself as a taxi driver in Strasbourg and then in Paris, but the French authorities did not give him a work permit. Disappointed, he turned to the Soviet Union, which finally accepted him in July 1935.

In the Soviet Union he earned his living as an unskilled worker in Stalinsk and later Dubrowka . He then became a truck driver and met Richard Engel again. In April 1937 Trapp went into the Spanish Civil War as a tank driver . Little is known about his role there. So he was probably used as an officer in a tank unit and left the country with the last units in 1939. In France he was interned in the St. Cyprien camp near Perpignan , but returned to the Soviet Union at the instigation of the Paris embassy.

Back in the Soviet Union, he worked as a tool fitter . After the Barbarossa company began , he was trained at a Comintern school and prepared for an assignment in Germany. On the night of May 18-19, 1942, he jumped with Walter Gersmann and Jakob Freund over a piece of forest near the village of Dittau . There was a firefight with local police officers in which Jakob Freund, the group's radio operator, was shot. Trapp and Gersmann managed to escape, but were picked up at noon after a search. The two were brought to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin and then interrogated by the Gestapo . In total, it remained in the hands of the Gestapo for a year. There he was forced to cooperate, which meant that he was one of the few Soviet agents to survive captivity, unlike his comrade Gersmann, who was executed in 1943. Trapp was then housed in various prisons until the end of the war. He later lived under a pseudonym in Cologne so as not to be extradited to the Soviet Union.

In 1948 he returned to Saarbrücken and worked as a taxi driver again. He died on January 9, 1974 in Saarbrücken.

literature

• Max Hewer: From the Saar to the Ebro. Saarland as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. 2nd, corrected edition, Blattlausverlag, Saarbrücken 2016, ISBN 978-3-945996-08-9 .
• Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Gerhard Paul : The splintered no. Saarlanders against Hitler . Ed .: Hans-Walter Herrmann (=  resistance and refusal in Saarland 1935–1945 . Volume 1 ). Dietz , Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-8012-5010-5 , p. 262-266 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Binder quoted from Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Gerhard Paul : Das zersplitterte Nein. Saarlanders against Hitler (=  resistance and refusal in Saarland 1935–1945 ). Bonn 1989, p. 262 .
2. ^ Günther Nollau / Ludwig Zindel: Gestapo calls Moscow. Soviet parachute agents in World War II . Blanvalet Verlag, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7645-0386-6 , p. 15 .