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Bernhard Schreiber * 1914

Wilstorfer Straße 45 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
BERNHARD SCHREIBER
JG. 1914
IM WIDERSTAND / KPD
VERHAFTET 25.7.1934
ZUCHTHAUS NEUMÜNSTER
1942 "STRAFBATAILLON 999"
SCHICKSAL UNBEKANNT

further stumbling stones in Wilstorfer Straße 45:
Erika Piepenbrink

Bernhard Schreiber, born 8 Nov. 1914 in Harburg, drafted into the 999th Division Probation Battalion (Bewährungsbatallion Division 999), missing

Harburg-Altstadt quarter, Wilstorfer Strasse 45

Bernhard Schreiber was born into a time of bitter need in Harburg – and throughout Germany. Soon there was no longer any sign of the jubilation with which broad sections of the population in the German Reich had welcomed and celebrated the outbreak of the First World War. Hunger and misery shaped the everyday life of many families in Harburg as well as in other parts of the German Reich. Many a mother, who now had to cope alone with the everyday life of the family, no longer knew how to allay the hunger of her children. The dissatisfaction of large sections of the population grew stronger the longer the war lasted, and it did not end with the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II and the silence of the weapons on all fronts.

The misery of the post-war years was hardly less and it promoted the formation of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which promised its voters a better life based on radical social changes modeled after the Soviet Union. It was able to increase its share of the vote in the Landtag and Reichstag elections continuously in the post-war years. The young Bernhard Schreiber also belonged to the followers of the KPD and found his political home in its ranks.

After Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, the situation also changed abruptly for the KPD. It was the first to be affected by the uncompromising policy with which the new rulers pursued their political opponents and successively smashed all other parties and their organizations. As early as 2 Feb. 1933, protest marches and demonstrations of the KPD were banned in Prussia and in many other federal states of the German Reich. Based on an emergency decree of the Reich President "For the protection of the people and the Reich” ("Zum Schutz von Volk und Reich”), the Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring announced two days later further interventions in the freedom of assembly and now also in the freedom of the press.

Even before 1933, the KPD had arranged throughout the Reich for an illegal continuation of its political work against the new Reich government. In Harburg, too, the party’s residential area and company cells were divided into groups of five members. In order not to jeopardize other comrades during raids by police, everyone had to be interested only in what concerned him and the group. Only the group leader had contact with other members of the KPD. They met in private homes or arranged small hikes into the administrative district.

At these secret meetings, information was collected, individual operations planned or arrangements made for the dissemination of important news that the official press concealed. In the Wasserkante district and in the Harburg-Wilhelmsburg subdistrict, the illegal Norddeutsche Zeitung played a significant role. It was produced in a private apartment on Neugraben and circulated underhand in various ways. Utmost caution was required, as the production and distribution of illegal newspapers was a punishable offense.

On 25 July 1934, Bernhard Schreiber was arrested at the age of 19 on the grounds that he had received and forwarded a package of communist newspapers. Nine months later, he was sentenced to one year and six months in prison by the Berlin Court of Appeal (Kammergericht). After serving his sentence in Neumünster in Schleswig-Holstein, he returned to his native town. He worked as a barber. In 1938, he met his later wife Bertha Schulz (born on 3 Aug. 1903).

Like all German men, Bernhard Schreiber was also subject to compulsory military service from the age of 18. However, because of his one-and-a-half-year prison term, he was denied the right to carry weapons to protect the German people. For a long time, he was considered "unworthy to serve” ("wehrunwürdig”) because of his prison sentence.

This situation changed after the high losses of the German Wehrmacht in the winter of 1941/42 at the gates of Moscow. The excluded now received the "chance” to "prove themselves” and to make atonement for their "guilt” vis-à-vis the German people.

On 15 Nov. 1942, Bernhard Schreiber was called up to the "999th Division Probation Battalion.” The assembly point was the 76th infantry barracks on Bundesstrasse in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel. From there, the 999ers were then taken in civilian clothes to the Hannoversche Bahnhof railway station in the port of Hamburg and transported to a train that took them to the "Heuberg” near Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg for training. Life and service at this training place hardly differed from the general conditions that characterized concentration camp detention.

The punishment soldiers were then deployed on particularly dangerous front sections. This was Bernhard Schreiber’s fate as well. In the spring of 1944, he was deployed to the Greek-Albanian border area, where partisans repeatedly inflicted heavy losses on the Wehrmacht. From a fight with partisans in May 1944, he did not return to his unit.

He has been missing since then. On 24 Apr. 1958, he was declared officially dead by the Harburg District Court (Amtsgericht).

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

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: StaH 351-11_52342; Komitee ehemaliger politischer Gefangener, Akte: Bernhard Schreiber; Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter, VAN (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1968; die anderen. Widerstand und Verfolgung in Harburg und Wilhelmsburg, VVN-BdA Harburg (Hrsg.) 6. Auflage, Harburg 2005; AB Hamburg 1941, Volker Ulrich, Kriegsalltag. Hamburg im Ersten Weltkrieg, Köln 1982, Ursula Suhling, 999er-Strafsoldaten – deportiert vom Hannoverschen Bahnhof. Hamburger Antifaschisten in Wehrmachtsuniform, Hamburg 2012; Dies., Wer waren die 999er?, Hamburg 2017.