Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Already layed Stumbling Stones


Friedrich "Fritz" Wolffheim * 1888

Friedrich-Ebert-Damm 49 (Wandsbek, Wandsbek)


HIER WOHNTE
DR. FRIEDRICH ’FRITZ’
WOLFFHEIM
JG. 1888
VERHAFTET 1939
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
DEPORTIERT 1939
SACHSENHAUSEN
RAVENSBRÜCK
ERMORDET 17.3.1942
’HEILANSTALT’ BERNBURG

see:

Friedrich ("Fritz”) Wilhelm Wolffheim, born on 30 Oct. 1888 in Berlin, arrested on 1 Sept. 1939, first in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, from 8 Sept. 1939 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and from the end of Aug. 1941 in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, murdered by poison gas at the Bernburg euthanasia killing center on 17 Mar. 1942


Friedrich Wolffheim (usually called "Fritz” by his comrades-in-arms) was one of the leading theoretical, albeit always controversial heads of the Hamburg labor movement in the first third of the twentieth century. In terms of his background, he seemed anything but predestined to assume such a political role. He was a son of the Berlin Jewish factory owner Georg Wolffheim and his wife Elise, née Mendershausen, and he had a sister named Theresa (born in 1887) as well as a younger brother, Curt (born in 1890), who was to become a judge at the Federal Fiscal Court (Bundesfinanzhof) after the Second World War. In Berlin-Kreuzberg, Friedrich attended the "Askanische Gymnasium,” a humanistic and classical-language high school with the reputation of being an elite school, until he finished school with his intermediate secondary school certificate (mittlere Reife) in 1904. After that, he completed a one-year voluntary military service, a three-year commercial apprenticeship at a hardware wholesaler in Halle, and finally worked for a short time as a commercial clerk in Cologne.

When he was 20 years old, a fundamental change in his life took place that no one in his family had expected: He became an editorial trainee at the Posener Zeitung and joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1909. As early as 1910, he set off for the USA to work for the SPD’s socialist sister party there. In 1912/13, he was editor-in-chief of their apparently German-language newspaper Vorwärts der Pacific-Küste (some of the specialist literature claims that it was a newspaper of the "Industrial Workers of the World” – a revolutionary syndicalist trade union confederation – but the title of the press organ speaks against this view). Fritz Wolffheim came back from the USA to Hamburg in 1913 and worked as a journalist for the SPD newspaper Hamburger Echo up to the beginning of the war. Until May 1915, he lived in the Hammerbrook and St. Georg quarters. Even before the outbreak of the war, he met one of the most influential theorists of the Hamburg SPD, the historian Dr. Heinrich Laufenberg, who had written a standard work on the history of the Hamburg labor movement and played a leading role in the party’s educational work.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Laufenberg and Wolffheim were among the few politically committed individuals who consistently opposed in public the war as well as the so-called party truce policy (Burgfriedenspolitik), with which all parties represented in the Reichstag (including the SPD) were integrated into the warfare of the Reich government. Like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, they condemned from the outset the support of the Social Democratic leadership for the war policy, especially the approval in the Reichstag of the war loans. Later, however, they did not join the Spartacus League, because they did not wish to cooperate in its merger with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – USPD), a split-off from the SPD also created during the war.

In 1914/15, they issued several self-published brochures in which they set out their opposition to the war and the cooperation policy of the SPD leadership with the Reich government. The price for this consistently critical attitude was their persecution by the imperial authorities and the prevention of their journalistic work by the Hamburg SPD leadership, which closed all party organs to them. Both were drafted into military service in 1915 as a punishment measure and sentenced to imprisonment in a fortress over the course of the war. In Jan. 1916, Fritz Wolffheim was sentenced to nine months in a court-martial for "lèse-majesté.” After his release from prison, he had to continue to serve as a soldier.

The political position of the Hamburg left-wing radicals led by Laufenberg and Wolffheim differed not only from that of the Spartacus League, but also from that of those left-wing radicals who had not joined it at the time. While the other left-Communist groups defended a resolute internationalism, the Hamburgers already showed a tendency during the first years of the war toward a position of "revolutionary defense of the fatherland,” even if they always strictly rejected participation in the First World War, since they condemned it as "imperialist” and as waged only in the interests of the respective bourgeoisie of the warring countries.

In their 1915 work entitled Demokratie und Organisation ("Democracy and Organization”), Laufenberg/Wolffheim already considered the "military subordination of the proletariat to the respective army command” as indispensable "in cases of war that threaten the life function of the economy” and if there was the danger that "more highly developed economies would be brought under the rule of less developed ones,” which can probably be interpreted as an allusion to the threat from tsarist Russia – at that time one of the main arguments of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – MSPD) for its advocacy of the war.

During the November Revolution of 1918, Laufenberg and Wolffheim played an important role in mobilizing the local workers’ movement, which eventually led to the collapse of the organs of the imperial state in the Hanseatic city at the beginning of November. Fritz Wolffheim was the keynote speaker at the mass rally at Heiligengeistfeld on 6 November, calling for an assault on the Imperial Military General Command, which initiated the establishment of the Hamburg Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, in which both left-wing radical leaders were decisively involved. While Laufenberg was chairman of the council until 20 Jan. 1919, Wolffheim vacated his position on 15 November because he had to be treated in a sanatorium until mid-May 1919 due to a nervous disorder.

When the German Communist Party (KPD) was founded around the turn of the year 1918/19, the Hamburg left-wing radicals under Laufenberg and Wolffheim also joined the new party; at that time, they and not the Spartacus League represented the clear majority of party members in Hamburg. However, the KPD did not tolerate their views for long, opposed as they were to the overall leadership of the new party across the German republic. At the Second Party Congress of the KPD in the fall of 1919, Hamburg-based and other left-wing radicals were suspended from further participation because they were accused of representing "syndicalist positions;” in Feb. 1920, they were formally expelled from the party.

After the Second Party Congress, Laufenberg and Wolffheim publicly began to propagate a political action program that strongly irritated practically all other forces of the radical left. According to their concept, later called "national Bolshevism,” after the takeover of power by the German proletariat, the war against the "imperialist” Western powers was to be resumed in an alliance with parts of the national bourgeoisie ("revolutionary truce” ["revolutionärer Burgfrieden”]) and with the newly formed Soviet Union. They understood this strategy as a "revolutionary people’s war” that was to be waged against the plundering of Germany by "Anglo-American financial capital” based on the Versailles Peace Treaty.

Through a national alliance with "patriotic” forces within the bourgeoisie (they regarded German big capitalists as vicarious agents of the Entente powers), a liberation of Germany from "foreign rule” was to be realized. Such a position was not only unacceptable for the KPD, but also for its split-off, the Council Communist left opposition (rätekommunistische Linksopposition), which in Apr. 1920 had merged into the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands – KAPD), including the Hamburg left-wing radicals.

After only four months of formal membership, Laufenberg and Wolffheim were forced out of this organization because of "bourgeois-nationalist views.” Through this renewed exclusion, the two Hamburgers, who shortly after the revolution were among the most important leaders of the left in the Hanseatic city, were caught in absolute political isolation, from which they did not emerge even with the founding of the "Communist League” ("Bund der Kommunisten”), which only led the marginal existence of a political sect. Finally, in 1922, the two politicians were alienated from each other when Laufenberg left the Communist League because his former political friend Fritz Wolffheim increasingly sought cooperation with "national revolutionaries” and right-wing nationalists, some of whom were oriented toward völkische ideas. Laufenberg then withdrew largely from active political life and only worked as a journalist; he died in Feb. 1932.

An important change in Fritz Wolffheim’s private life was his marriage in 1923 to Luise Wegner, a master milliner of the same age (she gave up her trade at the beginning of their marriage). The Wolffheim couple, who remained childless, lived in the Dulsberg quarter at Nordschleswiger Strasse 18 since the 1920s. In contrast to his old comrade-in-arms, Heinrich Laufenberg, Fritz Wolffheim remained politically active. He continued as chairman of the Communist League, which never succeeded in overcoming its local limitations and isolated programmatic position on the left. Instead, he increasingly sought allies from the ranks of the "national-revolutionary” right, parts of whom called themselves "national Bolsheviks” again starting at the end of the decade. Among them was the Group of Social-Revolutionary Nationalists (Gruppe sozialrevolutionäre Nationalisten – GSRN) founded in 1930, led by the young Karl Otto Paetel from the Bündische Jugend [German youth movement in the Weimar Republic] and representing a peculiar mixture of socialist and völkische ideas, propagating an alliance with the Soviet Union, which at least in terms of foreign policy was reminiscent of the positions of Laufenberg/Wollfheim about ten years earlier. The GSRN clearly distanced itself from the Strasser wing of the Nazi party, which was also excluded from the party in 1930, with respect to the emphasis on socialist positions and the – at least officially expressed – lack of pronounced anti-Semitism. Fritz Wolffheim was at least involved in the founding process of this group, even if it is unclear whether he also formally belonged to it. Paetel was arrested several times after 1933 and evaded a political criminal trial in 1935 only by fleeing into exile.

There is no doubt that Fritz Wolffheim’s political career must give cause for astonishment. It seems hard to understand how an intellectual of Jewish origin, initially strongly influenced by Marxism and syndicalism and a leader in the socialist workers’ movement, later came to seek a political alliance with people who were always susceptible to anti-Semitism and who had little to do with the ideals of the classical labor movement.

Nothing concrete is known about Fritz Wolffheim’s underground work after 1933; in 1948, his wife Louise stated that he "continued working quietly on his plan.” This included the struggle "in relation to alliances and groups toward a general non-partisan people’s organization on a broad democratic basis, set up in an organic structure.” From the beginning of Feb. 1933, he lived with his wife at Friedrich-Ebert-Damm 49 (later Adolf-Hitler-Damm). Both spouses seem to have had no gainful employment at that time; they received material support from Friedrich Wolffheim’s brother Curt, who guaranteed the couple’s livelihood by making advances on their father’s inheritance. Curt Wolffheim, who had lived abroad since 1940, also paid on behalf of his brother a "levy on Jewish assets” ("Judenvermögensabgabe”) amounting to 1,677 RM (reichsmark) imposed in 1938.

With the beginning of the war on 1 Sept. 1939, the massive persecution against Fritz Wolffheim began with his arrest. The date of his apprehension and committal to the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp (Kola-Fu) suggests that the persecution was not only racially driven but also politically motivated, since the Nazi regime apparently still classified Friedrich Wolffheim as "politically dangerous.” In the first week of Sept. 1939, he remained imprisoned in Hamburg, but was already committed to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the eight of that month. He remained there for almost two years before he was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp at the end of Aug. 1941.

In the spring of 1942, Louise Wolffheim was informed by the Gestapo that her husband had died of "pneumonia” in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on 17 March. In reality, however, Fritz Wolffheim was taken, like many other Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück that same spring, to the Bernburg euthanasia killing facility on one of the so-called "black transports” and murdered there with poison gas.


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

Stand: May 2019
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: 1; StaH, 213 Staatsanwaltschaft Oberlandesgericht - Verwaltung, Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1d; StaH, 331-3 Polizeibehörde Hamburg, Abt. IV (Politische Polizei), S. 19561; StaH, 314-15 Oberfinanzpräsident – Devisenstelle und Vermögensverwertungsstelle, Sign. R 1940/274; Schr. der Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen v. 20.10.2010; VAN (Hg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter, Hamburg 1968; Ulrich Bauche, "Wolffheim, Fritz", in: F. Kopitzsch/D. Brietzke (Hg.), Hamburgische Biografie, Bd. 1, Hamburg 2001, S. 350; Dirk Brietzke, "Laufenberg, Heinrich", in: F. Kopitzsch/D. Brietzke (Hg.), Hamburgische Biografie, Bd. 2, Hamburg 2003, S. 239f.; Hermann Weber/Andreas Herbst, Deutsche Kommunisten: Biographisches Hand-buch 1918 bis 1945, Berlin 2008, S. 882 Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus in Deutschland 1918-1933, Frankfurt 1972; Volker Ulrich, Die Hamburger Arbeiterbewegung vom Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zu Revolution 1918/19, Diss. Universität Hamburg, Hamburg 1976; Louis Dupeux, "Nationalbolschewismus" in Deutschland 1919-1933, München 1985; Hans Manfred Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918 bis 1923, Darmstadt 1993.
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".

print preview  / top of page