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Arnold Toschka * 1914

Tondernstraße 26 (Hamburg-Nord, Dulsberg)

HIER WOHNTE
ARNOLD TOSCHKA
JG. 1914
VERHAFTET
’VORBEREITUNG ZUM
HOCHVERRAT’
STRAFBATAILLON 999
TOT 25.10.1944

Arnold Robert Werner Toschka, drafted into the "Probational Battalion 999” in January 1943, died of the effects of the deployment October 25th, 1944

Tondernstrasse 26 (formerly number 23)

Arnold Toschka was the son of the blacksmith Adolf Toschka (born 1874 in Jägerswalde, County Sensburg, Eastern Prussia) and his wife Marie, née Andersen (born 1884 in Marienhof, County Schleswig). He attended elementary school in Hamburg and absolved an apprenticeship as a bricklayer from 1929 to 1932, In the 1930s and also after his marriage he lived with his parents at Lothringer Strasse 10 in Hamburg-Dulsberg. Arnold had his first negative en counter with justice shortly before the end of the Weimar Republic. After the end of his apprenticeship in April 1932, he had been without a job and lived from welfare payments. He got involved in an argument with a welfare agency clerk, and the dispute escalated. The official later testified that Arnold Toschka had hit him in the face. According to others who had witnessed the incident, the aggression had originated with the agency man. The Hamburg District Court, however, followed the version of the official and sentenced Arnold Toschka to six weeks in jail for "breach of domestic peace and violent insult on December 16th, 1932. However, he did not report to serve the sentence, possibly because he had gone underground.

This seems likely, because Arnold, like his father, was a member of the Communist party KPD – initially in their youth organization, the KJVD – and had to fear arrest by the Nazi regime that had come to power on January 30th, 1933. And he actually was arrested on March 20th, and on April 25th, 1933, the Hanseatic Special Court sentenced him to seven months in jail for a violation of the decrees of Reich President Hindenburg of February 4th and 28th and March 3rd, 1933. The decrees had been written by the Hitler government for Hindenburg to sign; the first decree curtailed the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press, the second, in the aftermath of the burning of the Reichstag, aimed at the "defense against communist acts of violence” and the "fight against activities of high treason”, i.e., it was mainly aimed at the Communists. In 1951, Karl Heinsohn, a comrade of Arnold Toschka, testified that Toschka had been convicted of "continuing the communist youth association” and served his sentence at the Hamburg jail for Juveniles on the island of Hahnöfersand until October 20th, 1933.

Hardly had his son been released from Prison, Adolf Toschka was arrested by the Gestapo. On February 11th, 1935, the Volksgerichtshof in Berlin sentenced him and 21 other defendants to three years in jail "preparation of high treason”, which he served at the KoLaFu concentration camp in Hamburg until December 11th, 1936. But Arnold Toschka, too, was not to remain free for long. On November 20th, 1934, he was again arrested by the Gestapo and admitted to KoLaFu. On May 22nd, 1935, the Hanseatic Supreme Court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison for "preparation of high treason.” Arnold Toschka served most of his sentence, until April 25th, 1937, in a prison near Wolffenbüttel. Shortly after his release, he found work in his learned trade. He lived with his parents in Lothringer Strasse again; in April 1942, he married Lotte Klindtwort, born in Altona 1918, who gave birth to their son Robert in September of the that year.

Only a few weeks after his wedding, Arnold Toschka was drafted to forced labor for the Organisation Todt in Norway. Without having been granted home leave or even allowed to write a letter to his young wife, he was assigned to the base training company of the "probation battalion” Bewährungsbataillon 999 (BB 999) at the beginning of January 1943 in Heuberg in the Swabian Mountains in southern Germany. From February 6th, he was assigned to the training company of African rifle regiment 961. In Heuberg, he was neither given pass, nor was he allowed to see visitors. Only once he could speak to his wife "through the barbed wire.” He told her that the training was very harsh and strict. "You even have to go out if you’re carrying your head under your arm.” Once he had got "three days of hard confinement” for insubordination. And he also told his wife he had been assigned to BB 999 because he was anti-Nazi and held communist views.

The harsh, inhumane conditions obviously contributed to the fact that Arnold Toschka caught tuberculosis of the lung after a few months of service; in May 1943 he was admitted to the Heuberg reserve military hospital. Since they could not cure him there, he was transferred first to the Hospital in Weingarten, Württemberg and in April 1944 to the reserve military hospital in Jesteburg south of Hamburg. But there, too, they were unable to restore his health, so that he was discharged from the Wehrmacht at the end of May; he was, however, kept as "pension patient” at the military hospital before finally being discharged to his family in July – the pension agency in the meantime had acknowledged his illness as "damage caused by military service” and granted respective payments.

He then lived only for a few weeks with his family and his parents in a garden house at the corner of Tondernstrasse and Nordschleswiger Strasse which after the war was given the number 23. His parents and his family had been bombed out in the Summer of 1943. On August 20th, 1944, he was admitted to the Barmbek general hospital on account of his enduring lung disease. Arnold Toschka died there on October 25th, 1944.


Translated by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2019
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: StaH 351-11 - AfW, Abl. 2008/1, Toschka, Arnold; StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Abl. 13; StaH 332-8 Meldewesen, Fotoarchiv 741-4 (Meldekarten der zwischen dem 1.8.1943 und dem 31.12.1945 Abgemeldeten und Verstorbenen); AB 1937–1943; VAN (Hrsg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933–1945, Hamburg 1968; Klausch, Hans-Peter, Die Geschichte der Bewährungsbataillone 999 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des antifaschistischen Widerstands, Köln 1987.