Willi Muth

Wilhelm Ewald "Willi" Muth , also Willy Muth , (born October 13, 1899 in Elberfeld , † January 25, 1935 in Wuppertal ) was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Willi Muth was drafted into the military in 1917, and deserted the following year . He then got involved in the socialist youth movement. Together with his brother Heinrich , he later joined the Free Youth Dawn (FJM), an anarchic organization, of which he became chairman in the early 1920s. The members of the FJM were dropouts who lived in a self-built hut in Elberfeld and thought a lot of “free love and nude culture, played the guitar and sings”. Friends described him as a friendly and warm-hearted person, a "vagabond out of conviction" and a "hippie of the 20s".

Muth also became a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union of Germany . After the dissolution of the FJM, he joined the KPD and married fellow party member Cläre Riedesel .

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in January 1933, the Muths organized the rebuilding of the KPD in Wuppertal. Although they escaped an initial wave of arrests, they were monitored. On January 17, 1935, Willi Muth was arrested when he wanted to meet two other activists, Wilhelm Recks from Solingen and Otto Heyler from Elberfeld ; The meeting was presumably betrayed by a Gestapo informant within the KPD. When Clare Muth realized that her husband had been arrested, she hid with friends in an attic and then fled to the Netherlands with the help of her brother-in-law Heinrich, where she learned of her husband's death.

Willi Muth died on January 25, 1935 at 4 a.m. in the police prison on Von-der-Heydts-Gasse. The Gestapo determined that Muth had "hanged himself with a self-tie on an iron ring in the cell of the police prison". The newspapers in the exile countries and the illegal leaflets later wrote that Willy Muth's body had "burns on hands and feet, his face was disfigured and black welts were visible on his neck," but he had not betrayed anyone despite the torture he had suffered. Whether he was murdered or took his own life "to make the ongoing investigations more difficult and to spare the other parties involved," according to the Gestapo, could never be clarified.

Muth's wife Cläre, who had married a second time in Mexico in 1942 and was now called Cläre Quast , returned to Germany after the Second World War and was involved in the GDR trade union movement .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tânia Ünlüdağ : “'Ms. Muth is undoubtedly to be regarded as one of the government's greatest enemies of the state.'” In: “Se krieje us nit kaputt”. Faces of the Wuppertal resistance . Edited by of the Wuppertal Resistance Research Group. Essen 1995, ISBN 3-9804014-2-1 , p. 32.
2. ↑ Cläre Muth (Cläre Quast) on startext.net-build.de ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

• Willi Muth on gedenkbuch-wuppertal.de