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Wilhelm Gaston Volk * 1906

Rademachergang 15 (Hamburg-Mitte, Neustadt)

HIER WOHNTE
WILHELM G. VOLK
JG. 1906
IM WIDERSTAND / RFB
VERHAFTET 28.2.1933
FALSCHE VERDÄCHTIGUNG
POLIZISTENMORD
UNTERSUCHUNGSGEFÄNGNIS
HOLSTENGLACIS
HINGERICHTET 8.8.1933

Wilhelm Gaston (Guillaume) Volk, b. 12.17.1906 in Strasbourg, jailed 1933, executed on 8.8.1933 at the Remand Center on Holstenglacis

Rademachergang 15 (Rademachergang 35)

The plans, in existence since the turn of the century, to demolish the northern part of the Gängeviertel for reasons of hygiene and urban development, were implemented by the Nazis immediately after their access to power. The workers’ quarter with its chaotically narrow alleyways and labyrinthine courtyards was considered by the new wielders of power to be a breeding place of communism, a citadel of the Communist Party [KPD]. Today’s four-story brick buildings in Rademachergang, Breiter Gang, and Kornträgergang were built between 1933 and 1936. The old-time inhabitants of the Gängeviertel were pushed to the city’s suburbs. The chimney sweep, Gaston Volk, also had to leave his dwelling at Rademachergang 35. When he was arrested on 24 March 1933, he was living at Hohenfelderstrasse 1, in the Hohenfelde quarter of the city.

Wilhelm Gaston Volk was born in Strasbourg on 17 December 1906; his parents had married in Alsace on 17 September 1904. His mother Elisabeth Volk, née Lamm (b. 12.25.1877) came from Zabern in Lower Alsace. His father Albert Volk (b. 8.30.1882) was born in Kehl in the County of Offenburg, Baden. He came, without his family, to Hamburg in 1922. Albert Volk opened a pet store in 1932 at Caffamacherreihe 71. Earlier he was a unionist in the metal industry and, until its banning in 1933, an active member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Gaston Volk followed his father from Karlsruhe to Hamburg in 1927. He, too, was active in the KPD and in the Gängeviertel cell of the Alliance of Red Front-Fighters (RFB) in the Hamburg New City. On 7 June 1929, 23 years old, he married the five year older Agnes Dittmann, who was born in Ehrenbreitstein in the County of Koblenz.

The RFB was founded in the Weimar Republic in 1924 and was the protection and security organization of the KPD; its members provided security at demonstrations, distributed pamphlets, and, above all, fought bitter street battles with the National Socialists. Reciprocal attacks on so-called Storm Trooper taverns were an order of the day, as, for example, on 28 February 1933. On this evening, shortly after 11 pm, members of the 3rd RFB Unit, based in St. Georg and Hammerbrook, made an armed attack on the W. Husen "SA-Meeting Local” at Woltmannstrasse 27. During the attack, which was considered retaliation for the Nazi attack on a KPD-local, the posted police lieutenant Kopka was shot. He died of his wounds on the following day but was able to give a description of the two perpetrators whom he had accosted on the street in front of the local. One was a powerful young man wearing a green shirt, the other was smaller, "without linen.” Both supposedly had come from the direction of Süderstrasse. Whether other people - a second or third was loitering in the vicinity - had shot at him he was unable to say with certainty.

On 24 March 1933, as the responsible attack leader of this RFB Unit, Gaston Volk (a.k.a. Gaston Gerste) was arrested and in a trial lasting several days charged along with a total of 17 suspects (see Stolpersteine in St. Georg, for Hugo Feddersen); also charged was the fugitive Erich B. who had knowingly and deliberately killed Police Lieutenant Kopka. On 22 July 1933, the State’s Attorney demanded the death penalty for Gaston Volk, on grounds of "serious breach of the peace with a firearm,” even though the act of murder was not proven against him.

In a plea for mercy to General State’s Attorney Drescher and in a letter to his wife, Gaston Volk averred that he had not shot at the police official. Even on 8 August 1933, as he was being fetched shortly before 7 am from the "cell of the condemned” no. 56, he was hoping for a "favorable turn in his fate, anticipating a pardon; this despite the fact that on the previous day the General State’s Attorney had informed him that the Reich State Holder Karl Kaufmann (b. 1900, d. 1969) would not make use of his power to pardon. On the preceding evening, he had bid farewell to his wife Agnes and his father Albert. He spent his last night with the prison chaplain, Pastor Lüder. According to a witnessing prison official, he had stood upright, and without uttering a sound, let himself be led to the scaffold. Even as he was being restrained by straps, he did not resist. Gaston Volk was the first person since 1917 to be guillotined; the apparatus had to be fetched especially from the Crime Museum; he was executed in the courtyard of the Holstenwall Remand Center by the Magdeburg executioner, Carl Gröpler (b. 1868, d. 1946 in the Halle Penitentiary).

After the carrying out of the sentence, Agnes Volk moved to Elbstrasse 34 (today, Neanderstrasse) and then, in 1936, fled into a second marriage, in order to evade further harassment from the Gestapo, as she reported after the war in an application for reparations. To the privately expressed opinion of the administrator in her case, that a conviction on the grounds of murder before 1933 was also punished with death, she responded: "That my husband was accused of a breach of the peace, nonetheless fills me with pride and shows that he was unwilling to bear the Nazi regime in silence.”

Agnes Herbst, the widow Volk, died on 16 March 1964 in Hamburg. Both her marriages were childless.

Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: June 2020
© Susanne Rosendahl

Quellen: StaH 351-11 AfW 31408 (Volk, Gaston Wilhelm); StaH 351-11 AfW 6122 (Volk, Albert); StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht-Strafsachen 00244/39 Band 1-6; StaH 241-1 I Justizverwaltung 2540; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 1008 u 256/1933; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 13206 u 377/1929; Meyer: Nacht, S. 36, S. 227; Seeger/Treichel: Hinrichtungen, S. 34f.; Bästlein/Grabitz/Scheffler: "Für Führer, Volk und Vaterland, S. 349; Lange: Architektur in Hamburg, S. 68.