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Hugo Feddersen * 1887

Amsinckstraße 71, Ecke Süderstraße (Hamburg-Mitte, Hammerbrook)

HIER WOHNTE
HUGO FEDDERSEN
JG. 1887
IM WIDERSTAND
VERHAFTET 1933
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
VERURTEILT 1933
TODESSTRAFE
FLUCHT IN DEN TOD
22.7.1933

Heinrich Christian Hugo Feddersen, born 23.7.1887 in Itzehoe, suicide in custody on 22.7.1933

last residential address: Lorenzstraße 3

Hugo Feddersen's learned profession was journeyman bricklayer, but shortly before his arrest he no longer practiced this profession, but was employed as a driver. He was married to Olga, née Tanck (born 1894), with whom he had the children Käthe (born 1912), Hugo Carl Max (born 1916) and Anna (born 1918).

He was politically active in the KPD and, according to the criminal records, was also a functionary of the Red Front Fighters' League (RFB), which he denied at the time of his arrest. In 1932, he was arrested for the first time for transporting weapons for his organization by car to his hometown of Itzehoe. He received a prison sentence for this, but was soon released from prison under an amnesty.

On February 28, 1933, four weeks after the transfer of power to Hitler by the Reich President, the RFB units of Hammerbrook and St. Georg carried out an armed 'raid' on the SA pub Husen, located at Woltmannstrasse 27. A police officer named Kopka was posted in front of the bar that evening in order to protect it, and he first noticed the two RFB men approaching the bar from across the street to investigate the situation on the spot. The police officer approached the two to check on them. This situation allegedly resulted in an exchange of gunfire between the officer and the two RFB men, who were shielded at some distance by other members of their organization, in which Kopka was fatally shot.

On April 26, law enforcement authorities arrested Hugo Feddersen and a number of other suspects (such as the chimney sweep Gaston Volk, later sentenced to death as the alleged shooter) and brought them before the Hamburg Special Court.

The court, chaired by Detlefs, the director of the regional court, assumed that Hugo Feddersen must have coordinated the attack and instigated the perpetrators simply because of his function as "deputy technical director" of the Hamburg RFB (he described himself only as a "liaison man"). The prosecutor at the special court Möller demanded the death penalty for him on the penultimate day of the trial, July 20, 1933.

Hugo Feddersen then hanged himself in his cell in Fuhlsbüttel prison on the night of July 22.

Since Lorenzstraße no longer exists, the Stolperstein is laid at the junction of Süderstraße and Amsinckstraße on the right-hand side of the former.

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: January 2022
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: AfW, Entschädigungsakte; StaH, Strafakten Staatsanw. LG Hamburg, 244/39; VAN, Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter 1933–1945, Hamburg 1968; AB 1933.