Willi Molitor

Willi Molitor (born May 25, 1902 in Essen , † January 20, 1953 in Heidelberg ) was a German trade union official and resistance fighter against the National Socialist regime .

Life and activity

Molitor was a son of Anton Molitor and his wife Grete, nee Darius. The father was killed in the First World War .

From 1916 Molitor completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith in Mülheim an der Ruhr , where he also stayed for a while as a journeyman. From 1921 he worked as a fitter for the Deutsche Reichsbahn .

Molitor was politically active in the union youth since 1917. In 1920 he became a member of the German Metalworkers' Association and the SPD . In 1921 he also joined the German Railway Workers' Association or the unified association of German railway workers . Around 1922 he began to take on voluntary functionaries in the SPD and in the union . He took on leading positions from 1932 to 1933 as a member of the Essen district board of the unit association and from 1926 to 1927 and from 1928 to 1933 as a member of the works council of the Reichsbahn repair shop in Mülheim.

After the National Socialists came to power in spring 1933, Molitor was dismissed from the service of the Reichsbahn in June 1933 and was henceforth unemployed. As an opponent of the new system, he attempted to build up a network of contacts for former union members in the Ruhr area . In mid-1933 he also became a member of an illegal SPD group in association with the SPD in exile in Prague .

1934 Molitor confidant of Hans Jahn for illegal union activities of the ITF in West Germany, among others, he made a trip to the ITF headquarters in Amsterdam and organized the importation of ITF and Sopade -Druckschriften to Germany from the Netherlands.

On June 8, 1935, Molitor was arrested as a member of the illegal SPD group. On July 9, 1936, he was sentenced to three years in prison . He also spent a while in the Börgermoor concentration camp . After his release from prison in June 1938, he was by the Gestapo to undercover agent blackmailed -Tätigkeit. As a result, he resumed his contacts with Jahn.

In January 1940, Molitor came to the Netherlands as an agent of the Gestapo , where he revealed his mission to the ITF and briefly lived underground in Rotterdam . On May 2, 1940, through the mediation of the ITF, he was evacuated to Great Britain by plane in order to be able to evade the access of the German occupation forces in the Netherlands.

The National Socialist police authorities used Molitor's escape as an opportunity to classify him as an enemy of the state : In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be killed by the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority .

In 1946 Molitor returned to Bielefeld . After 1950 he lived in Frankfurt am Main .

literature

• Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz : Railway trade unionists in the Nazi state. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration (1933–1945) (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 7). Metropol, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-353-1 , pp. 102, 112 ff., 148 ff., 157 f., 171, 234 f., 252, 277, 322, 339, 394, 468, 512, 518 ff, 582 f. (Short biography) and 607.
• Werner Röder, Herbert A Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933. 1980, p. 505.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Molitor on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .