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Wilhelm Marquard * 1905

Wattenbergstraße 11 (Harburg, Heimfeld)

HIER WOHNTE
WILHELM MARQUARD
JG 1905
IM WIDERSTAND / KPD
VERHAFTET 21.7.1934
1935 ZUCHTHAUS RENDSBURG
ENTLASSEN 1938
1943 "STRAFBATAILLON 999"
GRIECHENLAND
TOT 29.10.1943

Wilhelm Marquard, born on 12 Mar. 1905 in Harburg, sentenced for "preparation to high treason” on 17 Mar. 1935, committed to the Rendsburg penitentiary on 18 Mar. 1935, drafted into the 999th Division Probation Battalion (Bewährungsbatallion Division 999) in the spring of 1943, killed on 29 Oct. 1943 near Rhodes

Wattenbergstrasse 11, Heimfeld quarter

When Emperor Wilhelm II resigned at the end of the First World War and went into exile in the Netherlands, Wilhelm Marquard was 14 years old. As everywhere else in the German Reich, a workers’ and soldiers’ council had also taken power in Harburg. However, the workers’ movement, which was in power by this time, did not agree on the further course of the transformation of the German Reich from the outset, and these differences did not diminish during the following years. Those who disagreed with the political decisions of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on 31 Dec. 1918. The baker Wilhelm Marquard also joined this party in the 1920s.

The leading representatives of the SPD and KPD not only had different ideas about the construction of state and society after the collapse of the empire, but also about the right policy in the struggle against the Nazi party (NSDAP). While the KPD leadership, in agreement with the Communist International, considered the proletarian revolution to be the right response to the economic crisis and its political consequences, the leaders of the SPD tried to tackle mass misery through emergency decrees and cuts in state social benefits in order to stop people joining the NSDAP in large numbers. After Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, the worst fears of his critics came true. When the Reichstag burned in Berlin on 27 Feb. 1933, the NSDAP used the opportunity to blame the Communists for this arson. One day later, at the instigation of the new rulers, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg announced the emergency decree "for the protection of the people and state,” which suspended the fundamental rights enshrined in the Weimar Constitution. Police and SA promptly surrounded all offices of the KPD and gained access to all rooms in which they suspected incriminating material.

In Harburg, the police and SA entered the two KPD buildings on Lange Strasse (today Goldschmidtstrasse) and Knoopstrasse, searched the rooms and confiscated material – including for the Reichstag, Provincial Landtag and elections of the members of the city parliament (Bürgervorsteher) scheduled for Mar. 1933. Party officials, most of whom were well known to the SA, were searched without a court order. The victims were beaten, their cabinets and desks ransacked, and everything that seemed suspicious was confiscated.
Another practice of the Harburg SA was public "cleaning operations” in which well-known opponents of Nazi rule – above all from the labor movement – were taken out of their apartments and forced to clean in broad daylight house walls and advertising pillars of old party posters of the KPD and the SPD and of anti-Fascist slogans.

Many leading representatives of the workers’ movement – especially of the KPD – were arrested in such operations and on other occasions. During a large-scale police operation in the Phoenix quarter, during which more than 2,000 apartments were searched with the help of the SA, several Communists were arrested. They spent the next hours and sometimes days at the local Gestapo headquarters on Nöldekestrasse. Many did not return home after a few days, but instead were committed to the newly established concentration camps in the Emsland.

This was followed by the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” ("Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”), based on which all civil servants not guaranteed "to stand up for the national state at all times” were retired. These provisions also applied mutatis mutandi to workers and employees in state services. The Harburg magistrate then dismissed all municipal officials who belonged to Marxist parties and were unwilling to terminate their membership. Many Harburg enterprises and associations followed this practice. Soon the Führer principle applied in all areas of life. Employers’ associations and trade unions were merged to form the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront – DAF) and brought into line by a leader. Employers became company leaders and employees became their followers. Systematically, the Nazis asserted their claim to power in all state institutions and in an increasing number of social organizations.

After the first wave of arrests, the Harburg KPD also changed its structure in order to put up resistance. Small party cells, usually with no more than five members, who knew each other well and trusted each other, knew nothing of the existence and composition of other party cells. The members of a cell met irregularly in different places or for allegedly harmless leisure activities. They exchanged information, distributed tasks such as helping the families of arrested comrades and planning smaller actions, and organized the collection of membership fees and donations and the distribution of illegal pamphlets, including the party’s news organ, produced in strictest secrecy. It first appeared as the Norddeutsche Zeitung and then as the Arbeiter-Zeitung.

The publication and distribution of this illegal party newspaper represents one of the great achievements of the restructured KPD sub-district of Harburg-Wilhelmsburg and its newly appointed leadership, whose members pulled all the strings on location. This leadership in turn was the link to the secret leadership of the KPD’s Wasserkante district, which encompassed large parts of northern Germany. The illegal party newspaper appeared regularly every 14 days in large circulation. A single copy, consisting of four to six pages, was sold at the price of five reichspfennigs to reliable party members and trustworthy persons, or it was laid out at frequented places in the dead of night.

The new rulers registered these activities of the newly oriented KPD in Harburg, too, with great attention. Police and SA tried by any means to track down the masterminds. In the summer of 1934, they succeeded in gaining access to this network. Gradually more than 25 Harburg functionaries of the banned KPD and over 100 ordinary Harburg members of this party were arrested. One of them was Wilhelm Marquard, who was arrested on 21 July 1934 and taken to the police prison on Nöldekestrasse.

On 8 August, he was transferred to the Harburg pretrial detention center. In the spring of 1935, the Third Senate of the Berlin Court of Appeal (Kammergericht) conducted eleven trials against the persons concerned. On 17 Mar. 1935, Wilhelm Marquard was sentenced in one of these court proceedings to three years in a penitentiary, which he served in the Rendsburg prison.

Because of this penitentiary sentence, he was deemed "unworthy of military service” ("wehrunwürdig”) under the provisions of the law reintroducing compulsory military service enacted in the same year. That is, he had forfeited the "honor” of being allowed to carry arms for the protection of the German people. Like all other excluded persons, however, he had to report regularly to the relevant enlistment office. This situation changed after the heavy losses of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1941/42. At this point, the army law was amended so that previously convicted persons were given the "chance” to prove themselves as soldiers in the fight against Germany’s enemies and to regain their "lost honor.”

Wilhelm Marquard was also included in the forced recruitments ensuing in the spring of 1943. The basic military training took place on an old military training ground in Heuberg-Stetten in the southwest of the German Reich. This is where the Hamburg 999er penal soldiers arrived on five mass transports from the Hannoversche Bahnhof railway station in the Port of Hamburg to Storzingen, a small town near their first destination.

The training grounds were fenced by barbed wire and surrounded by watchtowers. These security precautions in themselves were reminiscent of a concentration camp, and what followed in the ensuing weeks was familiar to many recruits who had already spent some time in a concentration camp, above all the punishments and the consistent suppression of almost all contacts with the outside world. After completing a short basic training course, the probation units were deployed in North Africa, in the occupied territories of Western Europe and the Balkans, in the Mediterranean and on the eastern front. These were often fiercely contested front sections or areas with strong partisan presence, and the losses were correspondingly high.

Among those who did not return was Wilhelm Marquard. He lost his life when British planes attacked a German troop transporter on 29 Oct. 1943 while crossing to the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea.

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

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933–1945, VVN-BdA Hamburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1968; die anderen. Widerstand und Verfolgung in Harburg und Wilhelmsburg, VVN-BdA Harburg (Hrsg.) 6. Auflage, Harburg 2005; Harburger Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Bezirksamt Harburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg-Harburg 2003; Digitales Archiv ITS Bad Arolsen, Teilbestand: 6.3.3.2, Dokument ID: 99037337 – Korrespondenzakte T/D 395 260; Ursula Suhling, Wer waren die 999er? – Strafsoldaten in Uniform – deportiert vom Hannoverschen Bahnhof, Willi-Bredel-Gesellschaft/Geschichtswerkstatt Fuhlsbüttel e.V. (Hrsg.), Hamnburh 2017; https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafdivision_999, eingesehen am 12.4.2018.