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Rosalie und Georg Schmidt
© Privatbesitz

Georg Schmidt * 1903

Störtebekerweg 62 (Harburg, Neugraben-Fischbek)

HIER WOHNTE
GEORG SCHMIDT
JG. 1903
IM WIDERSTAND
VERHAFTET 1934
ZUCHTHAUS CELLE
SACHSENHAUSEN
TOT AN HAFTFOLGEN
25.8.1945

Georg Schmidt, born 7/30/1903 in Wulfsfelde, imprisoned from 8/19/34 until 2/18/1938 in the jails of Harburg and Stade, the Celle penitentiary and Sachsenhausen concentration camp; subsequently under police supervision; died on August 25th, 1938 from the consequences of imprisonment

Störtebeker Weg 62

As young man, Georg Schmidt moved from his home town of Bad Segeberg in Holstein to Wilhelmsburg, where he absolved an apprenticeship as a coppersmith. Later, he married Rosalie Marzinkowski, one his senior, who had also found y new home on the island in the Elbe; she came from Chwaliszew, a town that belonged to the Prussian province of Posen until the end of World War I and then became Polish. Georg, the Schmidts’ first child, was born on October 12th, 1924. At the beginning of the 1930s, the young family moved to Neugraben, where Georg’s brother Gustav Friedrich was born on June 12th, 1933. Unlike Wilhelmsburg, which was already strongly urbanized at that time, the village of Neugraben had largely preserved its rural character.

In 1928, Georg Schmidt joined the Communist party KPD, who had got 17.6 percent of the vote in the elections to the German Reichstag on May 20th of that year in the neighboring industrial town of Harburg-Wilhelmsburg. In the rural areas of Harburg County, including Neugraben-Fischbek, the KPD had difficulty in winning over major parts of the population for their goals – the electorate of these villages and provincial towns was strongly conservative and nationalistic. Already in the Reichstag elections of July 1932, 53.2 percent of the voters in rural County Harburg had opted for the NSDAP, whereas the Nazis had achieved only 29.5 percent in the city of Harburg-Wilhelmsburg. There, the two labor parties (SPD: 36.5 %, KPD: 20.5 %) had a theoretic majority; because of their ideological differences, however, they could not agree on a joint policy against the rise of the Nazis all over the country. SPD and KPD were unable to bridge the gap between their programmatic goals – a fact that endured until the Nazis banned them both.

When Reich President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor on January 30th, 1933, KPD leaders tried to win the General Trade Union Association (ADGB), the Christian trade unions and the SPD for proclaiming a general strike, these turned down the proposition, arguing that the new Chancellor had been appointed pursuant to the Constitution and that the prospects of success of such a move were slight. From the beginning of the new regime, the Communists were subject to massive terror by the Nazis. The murder of Martin Meuschel, a member of the Harburg KPD, was an early sad climax, but not the only bloody clash between Nazis and Communists in Harburg. Like elsewhere in Germany, local groups of Nazi storm troopers increasingly assaulted prominent KPD members after January 30th. The ban on demonstrating issued against the KPD in Prussia and other states of the German Reich already on February 2nd, 1933, was a further heavy blow against the party. In addition, the raids against political opponents were effectively legalized when Nazi storm troopers and members of the SS and the Stahlhelm were appointed as auxiliary policemen on February 24th, 1933.

Only four days later, after the burning of the Reichstag building, President Paul von Hindenburg issued the "Emergency Decree for the Protection of the State and the People”, repealing the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution. The first largescale wave of arrests was mainly directed against the Communists. In spite of this massive hindrance, the KPD won several seats in the following elections to the German Reichstag, the Hannover Provincial Parliament and the Harburg City Council. All these mandates, however, were quickly declared void, so that the Communists were unable to assume their seats in the assemblies.

Subject to increasing persecution, the KPD moved their political activities underground, in which they benefited from experience they had gathered before 1933. The KPD subchapter Harburg-Wilhelmsburg also created an illegal party organization with a complete structure from the district leadership, several quarter groups down to many small workshop and residential area cells. AY cell usually consisted of five persons. The dues were 1.60 RM per month. It was every member’s duty to gather information, organize the distribution of leaflets and newspapers, and protect threatened comrades from arrest and morally and financially assist the next of kin of murdered or imprisoned party members. Georg Schmidt belonged to a residential cell and also to a workshop cell of the R.G.O, the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition.

Producing and distributing the illegal party paper Norddeutsche Zeitung after the ban of the party press was doubtless a remarkable achievement of the newly formed illegal Harburg-Wilhelmsburg chapter of the KPD. The editorial staff initially met at the home of the Klafack family in Hohe Strasse in Harburg, later in the back room of what was to become the lending library in Wilstorfer Strasse and then again in the apartment of Hansine and Heinrich Klafack, who had found a new home at Störtebeker Weg 81 in Neugraben.

The paper was published twice a month with a circulation of 500, later 1,000 copies. It cost 10 pfennigs. At the beginning of 1934, the name was changed to Arbeiterzeitung – Einheitsorgan der revolutionären Arbeiter Harburg-Wilhelmsburgs. The paper was distributed far beyond the city limits, its regular sales reaching as far as Lüneburg and Buxtehude.

The Harburg Gestapo followed the distribution of the paper with increasing concern. The first two major arrest waves of 1933 produced no usable information about the whereabouts of the printing facility. However, the decisive strike succeeded on July 20th, 1934: Otto Dennstedt, a printer by trade, was exposed and arrested. In the following, one of Dennstedt’s contacts yielded the information that enabled the Harburg Gestapo to smash the complete organization of the Harburg-Wilhelmsburg KPD subdistrict. Within 4 days, the Gestapo arrested 25 KPD "functionaries” and closed the printing plant at Störtebeker Weg 81. A second wave of arrests followed in August 1934, jailing 32 persons, mainly from the rural hinterland. At the end of the further investigations, a total of 138 men and 17 women were arrested.

Among them was Georg Schmidt, arrested on August 29th, 1934. In January 1935, the third Criminal division of the Berlin Court of Appeals accused him and 18 other defendants of belonging to an organization that committed high treason by producing and distributing subversive anti-state papers. The precise felony he was charged with was to have arranged another defendant’s contact with a party functionary from whom he could get the Arbeiterzeitung.

The court held its sessions in Stade and sentenced Georg Schmidt to two years in jail. Having spent seven months in remand at the Harburg jail (8/29/134 – 3/21/1935), he was transferred to the jail in Stade for six (3/21/1935 – 5/8/1935) and then for the rest of his sentence (5/8/1935 – 8/29/1936) to the prison in Celle.

When Georg Schmidt had fully served his two-year sentence, the joy with which his whole family had been excitedly looking forward to the day of his release ended abruptly. Georg Schmidt did not return to his wife and his two sons in Neugraben; the Gestapo waited for him at the prison gate and took him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, where he spent another year and a half in "protective custody.”

This was common practice for the Gestapo: when an undesirable person had served his or her time in prison, they were again arrested – without a court verdict –imposed "protective custody” in a concentration camp on them. Georg Schmidt was registered as a political prisoner with the number 721 and assigned to block 11 in Sachsenhausen.

In those dark days, the regular correspondence between Neugraben and Oranienburg was a ray of hope Georg Schmidt, his wife and his sons. Some of Georg Schmidt’s letters are preserved; even though they were censored, they do reveal his silent hope for a happy reunion and his deep gratefulness for the many signs of solace and participation in his fate from his family. On February 18th, 1938, Georg Schmidt was released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. One week later, he got a job as coppersmith with the Hamburg company Rudolf Otto Meyer (now: Imtech), an enterprise that builds complex industrial production facilities.

The company operated all over Germany, so that Georg Schmidt was often away from home for months on end, installing equipment in buildings or on board ships. In spite of this, he was continuously subject to police observation. At home, he had to report to the Neugraben police station regularly and had to expect unannounced visits by the village police officer at any time. And for Rosalie Schmidt, daily routine as the wife of an "ex-convict” in the village was not easy, because the Gestapo did not refrain from paying surprise visits to search for incriminating evidence when they knew Georg Schmidt was Away from home. And it was not unusual for them to turn everything upside down in the course of such intrusions. In addition, the two children often had to sustain slander at school and in their neighborhood. When Georg Schmidt junior was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the eastern front in 1943, he could at least partly escape from this environment.

Georg Sen. saw the end of the war far from home. When he finally reached home in Neugraben in summer of 1945 after making great detours, he could only embrace his wife and his younger son. His elder was son was classified as missing in action.

This uncertainty weighed upon the family’s new beginning, and the troubles and anxieties did not decrease, because it soon turned out that Georg Schmidt had by no means overcome the effects of his three years in prison too his health and psychological burden of the following years under police supervision. In August 1945, he fell severely ill. When the family doctor admitted him to the St. Georg general hospital on August 24th, it was already too late. He did not regain consciousness and died the next day. His hope of gaining certainty about the fate of his elder son, perhaps even to celebrate a reunion with him did not come true. When the long missing Georg Jun. finally came home after years as a Russian POW, he could only visit his father’s grave at the cemetery in Scheideholzweg.


Translation by Peter Hubschmid 2018
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: January 2019
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Anklageschrift J des Generalstaatsanwalts beim Berliner Kammergericht vom 7.1.1935; Gespräch mit Gustav Friedrich Schmidt am 29.1.2013; schriftliche Dokumente aus dem Nachlass Georg Schmidts; Staatsarchiv Hamburg 351-11, AfW, Abl. 2008/1, 27891; die anderen. Widerstand und Verfolgung in Harburg und Wilhelmsburg, VVN-BdA Harburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg-Harburg 2005; Dirk Stegmann (Hrsg.), Der Landkreis Harburg 1918–1949. Gesellschaft und Politik in Demokratie und nationalsozialistischer Diktatur, Hamburg 1994.