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Bruno Meisel * 1883

Alsterdorfer Straße 113 (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)

Zuchthaus Brandenburg-Görden
ermordet 13.11.1944

Bruno Meisel, born 7/14/1896 in Klosterbuch, Saxony, beheaded on 11/13/1944 in Brandenburg

Bruno Meisel was born as the son of the forest worker Hermann Meisel and his wife Pauline, née Salzmann. He learned the trade of a butcher, but was drafted into the Imperial Army in WW I soon after finishing is apprenticeship. At the Russian front, he met members of the organized labor movement. After the war, he worked as a ship’s cook; from 1924, he worked as a shopkeeper for the Produktion consumers’ cooperative society. In 1927, he married his wife Anna, née Vernikel. Their son Hermann was born in November 1928. The family lived in Alsterdorfer Strasse in the Winterhude district of Hamburg.

After WW I, Bruno Meisel joined the trade union; in 1927, he joined the Communist party KPD and engaged himself in the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). In 1932, he was able to travel to the Soviet Union. After Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, helped distribute the now illegal KPD and RGO newspapers. His first arrest in 1934 led to a sentence of two years in prison for preparation of high treason, which he served in Hamburg’s Fuhlsbüttel penitentiary. After his release, he was under supervision by the Gestapo and without a job. Later, he found work as an unskilled laborer at a rubber goods factory; only in 1940 did he again find a job as a shopkeeper with the Schrader meatpacking company.

Because of a denunciation by a female colleague, Bruno Meisel was again arrested following the air raids that devastated Hamburg in July 1943 – the subsequent verdict of Roland Freisler’s Volksgerichtshof ("People’s Court”) stated that he had "attempted to corrode two of his salesgirls’ determination to maintain national self-assertion by communist diatribes.” He was transferred from Hamburg to Potsdam, where he was sentenced to death on October 13, 1944. Exactly one month later, Bruno Meisel was guillotined in Brandenburg-Görden.
His son Hermann attended the upper level of the Meerweinstrasse School (then called "Hans-Schemm-Schule”), graduating with a junior high degree. His teacher had considered him talented enough to achieve the upper level degree; but on account of the fact that the family’s economic situation had been insecure for years and his parents lived under the constant threat of a new arrest of his father, they did not dare to send Hermann to the high level school, which would have cost tuition. After the war, Hermann absolved an apprenticeship as a mason and later became a supervisor.


Translated by Peter Hubschmid

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2017
© Ulrike Sparr

Quellen: AFW 301128; Ursel Hochmuth, Niemand und nichts wird vergessen, Hamburg 2005; Totenliste Hamb. Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933–1945, Hamburg 1968.