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Adolf Panzner * 1892

Tondernstraße 7 (Hamburg-Nord, Dulsberg)

HIER WOHNTE
ADOLF PANZNER
JG. 1892
VERHAFTET 1936
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
TOT AN HAFTFOLGEN
6.2.1944

Adolf Panzner, born 4 Aug. 1892 in Hamburg, imprisoned 1935–1937 in Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, died from the longterm effects of imprisonment 6 Feb. 1944 at the Rickling Mental and Nursing Sanatorium near Neumünster

Tondernstraße 7

Adolf Panzner was the son of the innkeeper Julius Panzner and his wife Caroline, née Kohlmorgen. He completed commercial training in Hamburg and afterwards became an employee at a trade association. In 1916 he was drafted to fight in the war, and after World War I ended he worked as a clerk at the Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office, however he was dismissed in 1923. He had been politically active in the Germany Communist Party, and he managed distribution of their publications in Hamburg until 1932. In 1931 he became a member of the Hamburg Parliament, as successor to Ernst Henning (see his entry) after his murder. At that time he was already living with his wife Emmi, née Kuczynski (born in 1901), at Haderslebener Straße 2 where she ran a hairdresser’s shop.

After 1933 Adolf Panzner continued to carry out his political work in the underground in Barmbek, Wandsbek and Altona until he was arrested in autumn 1935. Initially he was detained in "protective custody” where, as his wife later reported, he was "chained” and "his head was beaten with wet towels”. At the end of Nov. 1935 he was taken to remand prison and sentenced by the Hanseatic Regional Court on 21 Mar. 1936 to a year and a half in prison and loss of his civil rights for two years for "preparations for high treason”; he served his sentence until 21 Mar. 1937.

After his release from prison, he lived with his wife at Tondernstraße 7 where she had moved with her hairdresser’s shop. The shop was likely the sole or at least most important source of income for the couple since Adolf Panzner was no longer able to work due to injuries he sustained in prison. Yet that source of income also dried up in the late 1930s because, according to his wife and two former neighbors after the war, she had to give up her shop under pressure from the NSDAP which eventually amounted to a boycott. In 1939 Adolf Panzner was admitted to the mental and nursing institution Holstein Sanatorium Rickling near Neumünster because of a "nervous condition” where he died on 6 Feb. 1944 in a "blackout”, according to his wife. The Rickling Sanatorium reported his cause of death as "cerebral arteriosclerosis with poor circulation”. Even if that may have been medically correct, it is very likely that the abuse he suffered during his detention contributed considerably to the early death of Adolf Panzner.

Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: February 2018
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: StaH 351-11, Abl. 2008,1, 25.09.01, Panzner, Emma; StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Abl. 16; AB 1933–1943; StaH 332-5 Standesämter, 2279 (Geburtsurkunde); VAN (Hrsg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933–1945, Hamburg 1968; Hermann Weber/Andreas Herbst, Deutsche Kommunisten. Biographisches Handbuch 1918–1945, Berlin 2008, S. 661.