Willi Probst

Willi Probst (* 1906 ; † May 14, 1942 in Mannheim ) was a German communist resistance fighter against the Nazi state .

Life

Willi Probst had come through his political convictions to join the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He was one of the active fighters against the emerging fascism and had joined the Lechleiter resistance group in Mannheim. In World War II Willi Probst became the Wehrmacht confiscated. Now it became his dangerous task to secretly pass the newspaper “Der Vorbote” on to his comrades in tunics .

When the Lechleiter group was exposed through treason in February 1942 , he too was one of the defendants before the People's Court , which pronounced its verdicts on May 15, 1942 in Mannheim Castle . But he and two of his fellow campaigners did not live to see the court verdict. Hans Heck and Fritz Grund suffered such cruel torture that they took their own lives. Willi Probst was kicked in the stomach the night before the trial, so that he died as a result of the torture.

memory

• In Mannheim's Schwetzingerstadt there is a memorial for the resistance fighters of the Lechleiter group by Manfred Kieselbach (1988) on Georg-Lechleiter-Platz, which was named in 1945 . Probst is also remembered here at commemoration ceremonies.

literature

• Max Oppenheimer: The Harbinger of the Fall . Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1969.