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Karl-Heinz Barthel * 1922

Langenhorner Chaussee 623 (Hamburg-Nord, Langenhorn)

KARL-HEINZ
BARTHEL
JG. 1922
VERHAFTET JUNI 1943
"WEHRKRAFTZERSETZUNG"
ZWANGSARBEIT KETTENWERK
GEFLÜCHTET / VERHAFTET
SONDERGERICHT BERLIN
HINGERICHTET 6.7.1944

further stumbling stones in Langenhorner Chaussee 623:
Otto Berger

Karl-Heinz Barthel, born on 27.8.1922 in Berlin, arrested several times, sentenced by the Berlin Special Court (Sondergericht), executed on 6.7.1944 in Plötzensee

Langenhorner Chaussee 623

Born in Berlin on August 27, 1922, the son of a merchant, Karl-Heinz Barthel attended an elementary school in Berlin-Schöneberg and then a private school. He was accepted into the Hitler Youth at the age of eleven. From 1937 to 1939, he completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith and aircraft precision mechanic at Askania-Werke Berlin-Mariendorf, the most important German company for aviation and navigation instruments at the time.

He then volunteered for military service. Two months after the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was called up on August 12, 1941 and was assigned to a flight training regiment. After initially having to take a break from the armed forces due to health problems, he joined the "Hermann Göring Division” in July 1942, a large parachute-tank formation that was subordinate to the Luftwaffe and at that time was recovering from the fighting on the Eastern Front at the Schleswig airbases. (The division was later responsible for numerous war crimes against the civilian population in the invaded countries: massacres of village populations in Italy, the incineration of Warsaw and others).

We don't know what Karl-Heinz Barthel learned about the front, what moved him and what his attitude towards the war was. The files only reveal his "deviant behavior”. For example, Barthel was once punished with three days of "aggravated arrest” after leaving the base without permission.

Finally, the recruit Barthel was also sworn in to the Führer and the flag and now belonged to "Airfield Command 108/XI (Sea) Schleswig”. Since being sworn in, Barthel could not get a verse he had read in the detention cell out of his mind. When he was transferred from Schleswig to Heiligenhafen, 50 kilometers away, in May 1943, he reached for his fountain pen during a trip to the toilet - it was his tenth day at his new location - and wrote the modified saying from the Prussian Pledge of Allegiance (Preußischer Fahneneid) on the white-painted wooden wall of the toilet:
"He who swears on the German flag,
no longer has anything that belongs to him.
The flag sparked the war,
brought us misery, death and horror.”

Similar variations of the Pledge of Allegiance adorned a number of Wehrmacht barracks during this period. A comrade discovered the rhyme the following morning and reported it. Karl-Heinz Barthel's version was considered by the Wehrmacht judiciary to constitute "subversion of military power”. After obtaining handwriting samples, the perpetrator was identified. And because a written statement of this kind was "likely to undermine the will of the German people to defend themselves”, a field court sentenced Karl-Heinz Barthel to one year in prison just a few days after the incident - a lenient sentence for this kind of war sabotage since the harsher penalties after the lost Battle of Stalingrad, when we think back today to the many death sentences that were handed down for far lesser offences at the time. And indeed, the sentence seemed too light to Dr. John, the Luftwaffe court martial councillor. "For the spread of such easily memorized verses,” John wrote, "means a tremendous danger, which must be suppressed in time and therefore combated by all means. [...] Only in view of the fact that the verses have only been accessible to the public for a very short time and that they have had no serious consequences, because they have generally met with brusque rejection among readers, a prison sentence of 5 years still appeared to be an appropriate and sufficient punishment for the defendant's crime.” Thus Dr. John in his justification of the second field verdict of October 27, 1943.

The note in Barthel's file "start of sentence after the end of the war” did not lead to his provisional release. Until the beginning of the prison sentence, members of the Wehrmacht who had been sentenced to imprisonment were sent to the Reich Justice Administration's detention centers for "safekeeping”, from where they were deployed in work crews for often very dangerous or particularly heavy work. From the overcrowded Wehrmacht prison in Altona (which the Luftwaffe also used for detentions), "Z prisoner no. 325/43” was transferred to the "Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel penitentiary and prison” at the end of 1943.

No photograph of Karl-Heinz Barthel has survived, but we do have a description of him from the time he entered prison, which gives us some idea of his appearance: He was 1.71 m tall, slim, weighed 69 kg and had dark blond full hair. His face was narrow-oval, his forehead medium, his eyes gray, his medium-sized nose was pointed, his ears close-fitting, his beardless mouth medium-sized with full lips. His teeth were a little patchy, his chin oval, but his posture straight.

In Altona, Karl-Heinz Barthels had made friends with Otto Berger, who was transferred with him to Fuhlsbüttel prison and ordered to a satellite camp in the "Hanseatisches Kettenwerk” munitions factory in Langenhorn. Here, 4,000 people worked - ten hours a day on average - for an insane war. The two soldiers were assigned to work in "Beize 14”, a heavily secured section of the factory. All doors and gates were locked during working hours, the air was stuffy and unhealthy, and the workers were under constant supervision. The Kettenwerk was regarded as a model National Socialist factory. The working days in the chain factory were long and exhausting.

Karl-Heinz Barthel and Otto Berger soon agreed: they had to escape this ten-hour front and the strict regulations for prisoners. They let a fellow prisoner, 20-year-old Ernst Gravenhorst, an electrical engineer by trade who had been sentenced to three years in prison for "desertion”, in on their plans. Ernst Gravenhorst, born in Hamburg in 1923, had become an infantryman when he was called up in October 1941. Since May 1943 - according to the files - he had belonged to the Grenadier Replacement Battalion (motorized) 90 in Hamburg, where some incident (of which we have no knowledge) earned him a prison sentence.
The three planned to use one of the cold, dark January evenings for their escape. On January 4, 1944 at 6:30 pm, the opportunity was favorable; only one person, the "Kommandoführer” Kopp, was in charge of 100 workers in three large factory halls. Under cover of the infernal factory noise, the three young men used chisels to break through the temporary partition wall to an external toilet facility, escaped into the courtyard area and climbed over the outside fence of the company premises. But Gravenhorst had lost sight of his two comrades in the rush through the darkness. While Barthel and Berger escaped into the winter night, he was apprehended by the factory guards.

Karl-Heinz Barthel and Otto Berger, on the other hand, walked to Eppendorf and got dressed at a friend's house in Erikastraße. They traveled - separately, as a precaution - to their hometown of Berlin on the night trains, which had few controls. They only met up again in Berlin ten days later, as agreed. In order to survive, they now committed several store and garage burglaries and car thefts - also with the help of Berger's 17-year-old girlfriend Carola Wahrholz - spent the night in a burnt-out air-raid shelter and finally rented a room.

Here they pretended to be a lieutenant and a first lieutenant, wrapping their shaven heads in bandages and declaring that they were "war-damaged” and about to be discharged from military service. When they drove through Berlin-Charlottenburg again in a stolen car (a Volkswohlfahrt vehicle) on February 10, 1944, they were stopped and arrested by the criminal investigation department.

Barthels was remanded in custody in the Berlin-Tegel prison, Berger in the "cell prison” in Berlin-Lehrterstraße. Public prosecutor Grassow brought charges on March 29, 1944. "As pests of the people and dangerous criminals”, the accused had taken advantage of the frequent bomb alarms to commit burglaries and thefts. He requested the most severe punishment available for the confessed perpetrators for their "particularly serious crimes against the people”.

Sometime between April and June 1944 - the exact dates are not known - the main trial took place in Berlin-Moabit. The special court at the Berlin district court sentenced Otto Berger and Karl-Heinz Barthel to death. They were executed in Plötzensee on July 6, 1944. Both at the same hour. Barthel was 21 years old, Berger 23.


Fellow prisoner Ernst Gravenhorst, who had been caught during the escape from the chain factory, was transferred to one of the Emsland camps (prison camp VII, Esterwegen) in February 1944. Pressed into the "Probationary Force 500” in July 1944, he was deployed on the Eastern Front from April 1943. In 1948, he returned from captivity as a prisoner of war in Tallinn to Hamburg, where he made a living as a commercial clerk.

It is not known what happened to Otto Berger's girlfriend Carola Wahrholz.

The Stolpersteine were laid in May 2019 at the place from where Karl-Heinz Barthel and Otto Berger managed to escape from the Kettenwerk. They are a reminder that prisoners from the "Glasmoor Penal and Juvenile Prison” and the Fuhlsbüttel Prison were also deployed in war production at the Kettenwerk from November 1942 onwards.

Translation: Beate Meyer
Stand: November 2024
© René Senenko

Quellen: StaH, 242-1 II Personalakte Zuchthaus Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel, 3705 Barthel, Karl-Heinz; BArch, Standort Eichborndamm Berlin (ehem. Deutsche Dienststelle/WASt), Sign. B 563/08711, S. 114; E-Mail-Auskünfte und Gesprächsnotizen nach Telefonaten mit dem pensionierten Archivar von Malchow (Mecklenburg), Dieter Kurth, vom 11.2.2019 und 4.11.2019; E-Mail-Auskunft von Dr. Elke Strang vom Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig, vom 25.3.2019; E-Mail-Auskunft von Wolfgang Thiele vom Gemeinschaftsarchiv der Stadt Schleswig und des Kreises Schleswig-Flensburg vom 25.3.2019. Weitere Hinweise erhielt ich dankenswerter Weise von Prof. Dr. Detlef Garbe, Vorstand der Stiftung Hamburger Gedenkstätten und Lernorte.