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Max Lübcke * 1899

Hartwicusstraße 3 (Hamburg-Nord, Uhlenhorst)

Verhaftet 1940 und 1943
KZ Fuhlsbüttel
gedemütigt / entrechtet
Flucht in den Tod
30.04.1943

Max Bernhard Kurt Lübcke, born on 1 June 1899, detained from 1940 to 1941, in 1943, suicide on 30 Apr. 1943 at the police station on Hachmannplatz

Hartwicusstrasse 3

Max Lübcke was born in Hof Redefin in Mecklenburg as the son of the state stud farm servant Georg Lübcke and Friederike, née Krüger. He indicated decorator as his occupation, and prior to his last arrest, he worked as a Reich employee at the anti-aircraft gun base of the Osdorf military barracks.

On 24 Feb. 1940, Max Lübcke was caught for the first time in the clutches of the criminal investigation department because of homosexual actions. Until 29 Feb. 1940, he was detained in "protective custody” ("Schutzhaft”) in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp and afterward, until his trial, in pretrial detention. On 10 Apr. 1940, he was sentenced by the Hamburg District Court (Amtsgericht) to one year in prison on charges of "unnatural sex offenses in twelve instances” ("widernatürliche Unzucht in zwölf Fällen”). A passage from the verdict reads, "The accused is a man who lets himself be seduced to any kind of aberration in sexual terms and abandons himself to his sexual aberrations.”

On 29 Apr. 1943, Max Lübcke was arrested again by a Kriminalsekretär [a rank equivalent to detective sergeant or master sergeant] of the 24th Office of the Criminal Investigation Department during a police raid on the public restroom at the intersection of Lange Reihe/Spadenteich, after he had been caught in the act with a member of anti-aircraft troops. After the first interrogations at the 44th police station of the railway station house on Hachmannplatz, Max Lübcke took his own life in his detention cell on the night of 30 Apr. 1943. An uncle informed about his death refused to take responsibility for his burial with the words, "We have all renounced the deceased because he was frivolous.”


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2017
© Bernhard Rosenkranz/Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaHH, 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen, 1247/41; StaHH, 331-5 Polizeibehörde – Unnatürliche Sterbefälle, 910/43; StaHH, 213-8 Staatsanwaltschaft Oberlandesgericht – Verwaltung, Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1 e; StaHH, 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferung 16; B. Rosenkranz/U. Bollmann/G. Lorenz: Homosexuellen-Verfolgung in Hamburg 1919–1969, S. 234.