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Hans Stoll * 1912
Heysestraße 5 (Bergedorf, Bergedorf)
Dänemark
tot 9.4.194o auf der Flucht (im Widerstand)
Hans Stoll, b. 2.3.1912 in Lohbrügge-Sande, died in April 1940, fleeing from Denmark to Sweden
Heysestraße 5 (Beethovenstraße 5)
Hans Stoll was one of eight children of the married couple, Anna (née Modrach) and Emil Stoll. He learned the bank clerk’s profession and, with his older brother Richard (b. 1908), was a member of the Socialist Workers Youth (SAJ), in the orbit of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Both brothers were board members of the local chapter in Sande-Lohbrügge, for the younger members of which Hans Stoll was responsible. The group took trips into the surrounding region and was schooled politically in the spirit of the SPD. At North Germany youth days, they demonstrated for the rights of young people, for better education, and the 8-hour day.
However, differences with the mother party soon developed. Many in the SAJ found the SPD too "bourgeois.” The SPD’s Reich Chancellor Müller in the late 1920s had agreed to the building of battle cruisers and had thereby broken a campaign promise. After 1930, the party, having lost governmental power, supported the Brüning government in an effort to hinder the participation of the Nazi Party. That government ruled by emergency decrees which did not have to be affirmed by the parliament. In tolerating that government, the SPD supported reductions in wages and unemployment payments. The young members of the SAJ from Bergedorf demanded of the SPD a concerted intervention on behalf of the interests of workers and were convinced that the capitalist system had to be abolished. They demanded worker unity and therefore also rejected the policies of the German Communist Party (KPD), which used its Revolutionary Union Opposition (RGO) to split the trade unions and whose "Social Fascism theory" placed the Social Democrats on the same level as the Nazis. In the fall of 1931, a great part of the Bergdorf and Sande SAJ-members left the SPD. Thereupon, Richard and Hans Stoll, along with others in the Bergdorf chapter of the SAJ, formed the Socialist Workers Party (SAP). In October 1931, it went national as a leftwing splinter of the SPD and also accepted former members of the KPD.
The SAP had anticipated the Nazi seizure of power and was therefore in a position in 1933 to organize illegally. A system consisting of five-person cells was formed, in which each member maintained contact with a member of further cells. The Bergdorf group around Hans and Richard Stoll, which included Walter Becker, as well as Hermann and Michael ("Michel") Pritzl, received the commission to establish an illegal printing press. This they did in the Stoll family home at what was then Beethovenstrasse 5 (today, Heysestrasse 5). The texts were set in print in Richard’s attic room; the printing was done on a crucible press in the basement. From March to August 1933, party information was printed in the "Spartacus Letters," and distributed in Bergedorf and the surrounding area. In the 1980s, Michel Pritzl talked about the printing set up: "At the end of July, beginning of August [1933] we began the printing of the 2nd edition of our ‘Spartacus Letters.’ Setting it in print in Richard’s attic room, we worked mostly in silence, for other families lived in the house. At that time, we could trust no one …. Anni and Walter Adams also helped us. So it happened that someone would say, ‘Give me an E!’ or ‘Give me an A over here!’ The son-in-law of the Barkow neighbors, a certain Burmester, must have heard that. In any case, the snitch squealed on us.”
But the group got wind of the danger and Richard Stoll had buried all the well-packed printing equipment in the family’s garden plot. On 27 August 1933, Richard Stoll was arrested in the apartment on Beethovenstrasse. His brother Hans followed later because there was no more room in the Gestapo paddy wagon. The Gestapo wanted to search the garden plot as well, but Richard led them to a second plot that belonged to the family, which was, however, "clean." After severe abuse, which, among other things, damaged his hearing, Richard Stoll was handed over to the state prosecutor and in January 1934 sentenced to two and one-half years in jail. After serving his time, he was released, but could not at first find work in Bergedorf. After a period of agricultural work in Mecklenburg, he returned to Bergedorf in 1939. Meanwhile, he had married and found work in a Bergedorf iron works. In November 1942, having already been declared "unworthy of military service,” he was drafted into "Penal Battalion 999.” In Greece, he was wounded and then fell briefly into American captivity; he was able to return to Bergedorf in July 1945.
Hans Stoll, with the help of party members, escaped from Hamburg and Flensburg to Copenhagen, where he met up with Michel Pritzl and other members of the Bergedorf SAP group. They received aid from the Social Democratic Matteotti Committee. They learned Danish and discussed with one another and with other émigrés the political and social situation in Germany. There were disagreements with the Communists, but also with Willy Brandt, then a member of the SAP. He had been commissioned by the party leadership to form an alliance with all the anti-Hitler groups, including with the "left” Strasser-wing of the Nazi Party, which had recently been persecuted in Germany. The Bergedorf contingent rejected collaboration with the – then as now Fascist – Strasser people. In his spare time, Hans Stoll together with other émigrés played on a soccer team; he also helped Michel Pritzl with the left-wing "Exile Press." At first the Bergedorf group lived in an apartment-sharing community, but this was disbanded around 1937. Walter Becker had gone to Sweden; Michel Pritzl had married Anni, his Bergedorf fiancé, and Hermann Pritzl married his Danish girlfriend. Hans Stoll sublet a room.
On 9 April 1940, Denmark was occupied by German troops. The political exiles immediately began to organize flight possibilities to Sweden. Not everyone succeeded in making the jump. Michel Pritzl was arrested on 19 April 1940. After jailings in a Danish holding camp, the Hamburg detention prison, and the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, with the usual interrogations and beatings, Pritzl was finally sentenced to a year in jail. He was released in August 1942.
Shortly after Pritzl’s arrest, Hans Stoll got to Sweden on a fishing boat. Anni Pritzl reported: "After Michel’s arrest, Hans Stoll came to me. It was the evening before his planned passage to Sweden. He actually did not want to go. He said, he had such a strange feeling that something would go wrong. Above all, he did not want to flee with a certain Strassermann, one of the ‘Black Front,’ that is, a Fascist. He did not trust him. When he left me, he had firmly decided not to sail. Moreover, his conscience was bothering him over Günther Hopfe, who was old, near-sighted, and clumsy. The passage to Sweden was also not without its problems. It would take place at night. The refugees would be dropped off the Swedish coast in chest-high water. And without his money for the passage, the trip would not happen ... He then probably made up his mind to go with.
The five German émigrés did not arrive in Sweden. After the war, the Danish fisherman said that he had taken the five on board and dropped them off the coast. Later, we thought about this again and again and still today think about what actually happened. For a long time we thought that the Strasser-ite had betrayed the five to the Gestapo which then ‘liquidated’ them.
The fisherman probably told us a lie out of anxiety. Why would the Gestapo kill their prisoners before the ‘infamous’ interrogations, and that in 1940? It could be that the five drowned off the Swedish coast because the fisherman left them off on a sand bank. They were wearing all their clothing, layer after layer, because they were not permitted to take luggage with them. Perhaps, with all that, they could not swim to land. However, up to this point in time, no corpses have been found off the coast of Sweden. Walter Becker asked investigations in Sweden for this purpose."
No more precise information about the circumstances of Hans Stoll’s death is available, to the present day.
Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.
Stand: January 2019
© Björn Eggert, Ulrike Sparr
Quellen: StaH 242-1 II, Abl. 13 (Strafhaft Männer, Karteikarte Richard Stoll); StaH 332-8 (Hauskartei), Film 2466 (Heysestr.5); FZH, Nachlass Blankenfeld 18-2 2.3.5, AvS Hamburg, Mitglieder; Alfred Dreckmann, Wer nicht getauft ist, aufsteh’n!" – Das andere Bergedorf, Hamburg 1987; ders., In Bergedorf war alles genauso (Schlosshefte 9), 2. Aufl. Bergedorf 2004; Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Gedenkstätten für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Band 1, Bonn 1995, S.265/266 (StaH: L 328/00062a); VVN (Hrsg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter, Hamburg 1968; Sozialistische Mitteilungen Nr. 85 (Dez. 1945); Für Freiheit und Demokratie, Hamburger Sozialdemokratinnen und Sozialdemokraten in Verfolgung und Widerstand 1933–1945, Hrsg. SPD-Landesorganisation Hamburg, Hamburg, 2003, S. 146f.
