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Heinrich Emil Matz * 1907
Bartelsstraße 53 (Altona, Sternschanze)
HIER WOHNTE
HEINRICH
EMIL MATZ
JG. 1907
IM WIDERSTAND / KPD
KZ NEUENGAMME
ERMORDET 23./24.4.1945
further stumbling stones in Bartelsstraße 53:
Kurt Erich Cäsar Schill
Heinrich Emil Matz, born 14.10.1907 in Hanau, murdered in Neuengamme concentration camp between 22. and 24.4.1945
Bartelsstraße 53 (Altona, Sternschanze)
Heinrich Emil Matz (born 4.10.1907 in Hanau) was one of the 71 so-called "protective custody prisoners” of the Gestapo who were murdered in the detention bunker of the Neuengamme concentration camp between April 22 and 24, 1945 - hanged, beaten to death, torn apart by hand grenades, shot in the head (for literature on this, see "Sources”). What is known about him is very fragmentary. One of the reasons for this is that he was sometimes confused in biographical references with another Heinrich Matz (born 9.2.1908 in Neuscheidt/Saarbrücken), so that potential contemporary witnesses were overlooked for too long and can no longer be questioned about his person today. Both namesakes fell victim to the Nazi dictatorship: "For repeated theft”, Matz from Neuscheidt was sentenced to death by the Saarbrücken Special Court as a so-called "Volksschädling” and beheaded on August 24, 1944 in Bruchsal Prison, one of the central execution sites of the National Socialists. He had worked temporarily as a salesman in his parents' grocery store in Neuscheidt and also as a laborer. Nothing is known of any political activity on the part of Heinrich Matz.
Heinrich Emil Matz from Hanau, to whom the Stumbling Stone in Hamburg and biography are dedicated, was born as the son of the decorative painter Emil Otto Matz (born 9.4.1869 - 14.7.1934) and his wife Elisabeth, née Boos (born 16.1.1876 - 11.3.1934). The Matz family in Hanau had many children. Heinrich Emil was the tenth of eleven children. His siblings were Maria Wilhelmine (born 31.5.1893 - 1.4.1989, sorter), Anna (born 26.9.1894 - 18.1.1952), Elisabeth (born 28.12.1895), Margarete (born 8.12.1896 - 8.8.1977, housemaid), Helene (born 26.6.1899 - 9.1.1900), Otto Karl (born 29.8.1901 - 15.12. 1977, master white binder), Else (born 29.8.1906 - 5.10.2010), Henriette Emilie (born 14.12.1904 - 2.1.1989), Georg Karl (born 14.8.1906 - 7.7.1939, worker, suicide) and Rudolf (born 1.6.1916, printer, killed in action as a boatswain in the navy in March 1945 near Gdynia/Gdingen/Gotenhafen). Two other children had already died shortly after birth. Matz's parents, plagued by illness and bedridden, took their own lives a few months apart.
Nothing has survived of Heinrich Emil Matz's entire childhood and youth in Hanau, his schooling and vocational training. However, as his tax and electoral register from 1943 shows, he moved to Hamburg in October 1928 at the age of 21, having just come of age. He must have become politically active immediately, as the first entry in his Hamburg prison records shows that he was sentenced to six months in prison for "breach of the peace” by the Hamburg district court on January 9, 1929, but was then released early after four months in Fuhlsbüttel prison (3.6.1929 – 24.10.1929). What his offense actually consisted of is not documented. Essentially, however, "breach of the peace” (§125 StGB) means participation in a gathering of people from which violence against persons or property emanates. This was often the case at demonstrations in those years of the Weimar Republic.
His occupation is listed as "unskilled worker” on the file card. In later documents, he was also entered as a laborer and heating assistant.
It is safe to assume that Heinrich Emil Matz was already active in the ranks of the Communist Party (KPD) at that time. It is not known when he officially joined the party. However, his marriage (on 27.2.1935) to Margot Anne Marie Pfeiffer (born on 25.10.1916 in Hamburg) shows that his relationship with the party went beyond the political. Margot's sister was Hilde (Hilda) Schill (21.1.1912 - 19.10.1988), the wife of Kurt Schill (7.7.1911 - 14.2.1944, biography see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de), who was one of Hamburg's most active communists. The young Matz couple initially lived at Kohlhöfen 42, 1st floor, in Hamburg's Neustadt district, subletting from a sailor's family, and later together with Kurt and Hilde Schill at Bartelsstraße 53, 4th floor, in the Sternschanze district.
From his apartment in the Kohlhöfen, Heinrich Emil Matz campaigned for the aims of the Communist Party (KPD), primarily in the Neustadt district, and especially on Großneumarkt, the central square and busiest place in the district. Together with Kurt and Hilde Schill and comrades Bruno Endrejat (19.5.1908 - 23./24.4.1945) and William Robert Dabelstein (15.7.1908 - 30.1.1943), who all lived in the Neustadt at the beginning of the 1930s, he probably formed one of the so-called Five Groups in 1935. (See the respective biographies on this homepage www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) The limitation to a small number of people corresponded to the need for security in view of the persecution by the police, the danger posed by informers and the recommendations of the Brussels Conference of the KPD (1935).
The group had a small duplicating machine, which was hidden in Schill's house. With smaller flyers, but also with more extensive leaflets, which were distributed to the public in the area with the greatest precautions, the Five tried to educate people about the Nazi dictatorship - e.g. about the concentration camp system and preparations for wars of aggression - and to encourage resistance. A poster campaign at Großneumarkt in the fall of 1936 in connection with the imminent execution of the Hamburg communist Edgar (Etkar) André (for a biography, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) was spectacular, as was the leaflet that appeared in Hamburg after André's beheading on November 4, 1936.
This action is attributed to the Five Group in communist literature. Some copies of the leaflet have survived. It covers an entire, closely printed DIN A4 page, has a mourning border, shows André's drawn portrait and is marked as an "obituary”. It begins with the words: "A storm of indignation and disgust is sweeping through all of civilized humanity... The bloody Hitler terror has claimed a new victim...” After describing the deeds of this "upright hero of the working German people” and his suffering under the "torture of the degenerate rulers”, the text ends with a call to intensify the fight against "the henchmen of finance capital”. The last words of the leaflet read: "Edgar André lives. We march in his spirit: In spite of everything.”
This tremendously courageous and difficult action at the end of 1936 cannot have been carried out by all five of them, however, because - as the prisoner card mentioned above also shows - on April 16, 1935, Heinrich Emil Matz was sentenced to one year in prison by the Hamburg Special Court for violating the "Decree of the Reich President for the Preservation of Internal Peace of December 19, 1932”( "Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zur Erhaltung des inneren Friedens vom 19.12.1932”) and, on the same charge, to a further year and four months on November 26, 1935. He was to be released in August 1937. In this case, too, the specific offense is not known. However, according to the aforementioned decree, punishable offences included supporting a banned organization, distributing illegal publications, insulting the Reich or the German military, making fun of the state flag, etc. A KPD member could not avoid criminal liability. Heinrich Emil Matz served a large part of his sentence in Lübeck prison, a branch of the Hamburg prison system. He was released early after two years on April 17, 1937.
In the meantime, another blow had hit the group hard: William Robert Dabelstein had been arrested on April 17, 1936 for "preparation for high treason” (Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat) and sentenced to three and a half years in prison by the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court on January 5, 1937. Another five years were added in a further trial on May 19, 1938. In the Börgermoor penal camp in Emsland, he was physically ruined by forced labor in the moors and mistreatment. Meanwhile a prisoner of the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, he died on January 30, 1941 in the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Hospital, according to official records from lung cancer. William Dabelstein was 42 years old.
After Heinrich Emil Matz's return, the group, which now consisted of four people, gained new strength and even expanded its activities: Through Bruno Endrejat and Kurt Schill, contact and cooperation was established in 1939 with the most important and largest Hamburg resistance organization, the group around Bernhard Bästlein, Franz Jacob and Robert Abshagen (for biographies, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de). This group was mainly active in the port and in industrial companies and, after the start of the war, turned its attention in particular to forced laborers from the occupied countries.
In addition to leafleting and information campaigns in Neustadt, the group now worked more practically: it hid comrades on the run, such as the couple Walter and Änne Bohne, who had gone into hiding, obtained ration cards and money for them and helped to support the forced laborers, who naturally lacked all the necessities of life, especially food and clothing. The work was temporarily made more difficult again in 1943: Kurt Schill, who was actually a chemographer for photographic clichés by profession, but had been serving with the Reichsbahn since 1939, was transferred to the occupied part of the Soviet Union at the beginning of April, but was transferred back to Hamburg in July 1943 after the heavy attacks on Hamburg ("Operation Gomorrah”).
The year 1944 brought disaster to the Four:
On January 6, 1944, Kurt Schill was arrested by the Gestapo and hanged without trial in the bunker of Neuengamme concentration camp on February 14, 1944. Bruno Endrejat was also arrested on January 6, 1944. After more than a year in the Fuhlsbüttel police prison, as the infamous KoLa-Fu was officially known, Endrejat was murdered with 70 other so-called Gestapo protective custody prisoners between April 22 and 24, 1945, also in the bunker of Neuengamme concentration camp and also without any trial.
Heinrich Emil Matz also fell victim to the same monstrous murder in the last days of Nazi terror. It is not known when he was arrested or when he was held in Fuhlsbüttel ready for the massacre in Neuengamme. It is known about his last time in freedom: His marriage to Margot had broken up. He had left the Schills' apartment and lived in rooms with the foreman of his last employer, Adolf Sager/Heizungsbau und Lüftungsanlagen, on the company premises at Bahrenfelderstraße 19a in Altona. He left behind a bicycle, a two hundred cc motorcycle and a suitcase with clothes and linen. Heinrich Emil Matz was 37 years old.
Hilde (Hilda) Schill was the only one of the group of five to survive: arrested by the Gestapo on August 29, 1944 "for assisting fugitives to the detriment of the Reich”, she was first sent to Fuhlsbüttel, then to the remand prison at Holstenglacis. The threatened trial before the People's Court did not take place. On May 3, 1945, the British occupied Hamburg and Hilde Schill was freed.
Translation: Beate Meyer
Stand: November 2024
© Johannes Grossmann
Quellen: www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de >Glossar> Neuengamme (KZ): "Die Ermordung von 71 `Schutzhäftlingen` zwischen dem 22. und 24 April 1945"; ebd. >Dokumentationen> Hamburger Abendblatt Magazin: Die letzten Toten von Neuengamme. Siehe auch die Biographien anderer in dieser Aktion Ermordeter: Margit Zinke, Heinrich Schröder, Vincent Scharlach, Heinrich Bachert unter www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de.
Stadtarchiv Hanau: Geburtsurkunde Hanau Nr. 589/1907 (Heinrich Emil Matz) und Heiratsurkunde Hanau Nr. 31/1893 (Emil Otto Matz und Elisabeth Matz geb. Boos); Standesamt Hanau: Geburtsurkunde 157/1916 (Rudolf Matz), Heiratsurkunden 278/1920 (Marie Wilhelmine Matz), 421/1921 (Otto Karl Matz), Todesurkunden 482/1900 (Helene Matz), 431/1909 (Wilhelm Matz), 24/1911 (Gertrud Matz), 131/1934 (Elisabeth Matz geb. Boos), 190/1934 (Emil Otto Matz), 449/1939 (Georg Karl Matz); Standesamt Frankfurt/Main: Heiratsurkunde 140/1916 (Margarete Matz); StaH 332-5_14461, Nr. 135, Heiratsurkunde Heinrich Emil Matz und Margot Anna Marie Matz geb. Pfeiffer); Staatsarchiv Hamburg (StaH) 332-8 Meldewesen, 741-4 Fotoarchiv K 4806 (Heinrich Matz); StaH 332-8 Hausmeldekartei, 741-4 Fotoarchiv K 2382 (Bahrenfelderstraße 19 II); 741-4 Fotoarchiv K 2512 (Bartelsstraße 53 IV); StaH 213-13_ 14560 Landgericht Hamburg, Rückerstattungssachen; StaH 351-11_37846 und 351-11_37847 Amt für Wiedergutmachung (Hilda Schill); StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung, 741-4 Fotoarchiv A 478 (Heinrich Matz); Gedenkstätte Ernst Thälmann Hamburg: Flugblatt "Nachruf Edgar André"; Reichsgesetzblatt, Jg. 1932, Teil I, S. 548 f.
Auskünfte von: Rudolf Waldschmidt, Rodenbach b. Hanau, 21.2.2024; Peter Wettmann-Jungblut, Landesarchiv Saarland, 20.1.2023; Jan Nils van der Pütten, Stadtarchiv Hanau, 13.2.2023 und 2.1.2024; Jacob Michelsen, Archivgruppe der VVN Hamburg, 12.5.23. Klaus Bästlein, "Hitlers Niederlage ist nicht unsere Niederlage, sondern unser Sieg!" Die Bästlein-Organisation. Zum Widerstand aus der Arbeiterbewegung in Hamburg und Nordwestdeutschland während des Krieges (1939-1945), in: Beate Meyer/Joachim Szodrzynski (Hrsg.), Vom Zweifeln und Weitermachen. Fragmente der Hamburger KDP-Geschichte, Hamburg 1988, S. 44 – 89; Ursula Puls: Die Bästlein-Jacob-Abshagen-Gruppe, Berlin 1959; Gertrud Meyer, Nacht über Hamburg, Frankfurt/Main 1971; Ursel Hochmuth/Gertrud Meyer: Streiflichter aus dem Hamburger Widerstand 1933-1945, Frankfurt/Main 1980; Herbert Diercks: Gedenkbuch Kola-Fu/ Für die Opfer aus dem Konzentrationslager, Gestapogefängnis und KZ-Außenlager Fuhlsbüttel, Hamburg 1987; Heike Jung, Rainer Möhler: Strafvollzug im "Dritten Reich" am Beispiel des Saarlandes, Baden-Baden 1996, S. 227 und Anm. 165; Hanauer Anzeiger, Artikel zu Heinrich Emil Matz, 27.1.2024.