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Albert Voigts * 1904

Eißendorfer Straße 88 (Harburg, Eißendorf)

HIER WOHNTE
ALBERT VOIGTS
JG. 1904
VERHAFTET 16.10.1942
IM WIDERSTAND
"ROTE KAPELLE"
GEFÄNGNIS BERLIN
SACHSENHAUSEN
ERMORDET 30.6.1943

Albert Voigts, born on 4 June 1904 in Harburg, charged with "preparation to high treason” in Feb. 1943, committed to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in May 1943, murdered on 30 June 1943

Eissendorf quarter, Eissendorfer Strasse 88

Albert Voigts was born as the only son of the official weigher Friedrich Voigts and his wife Wilhelmine Voigts.

As a student, he attended the nearby Harburg Realgymnasium (today Friedrich-Ebert-Gymnasium) [a high school focused on the sciences, math, and modern languages], which was then located in the school building at Eissendorfer Strasse 26, where today the students of the Goethe-Schule-Harburg are taught. Still in his school days, Albert Voigts joined the "rambling bird” (Wandervogel) youth movement, "Wandervogel e. V. - Bund für deutsches Jugendwandern.”

Like the pioneers of this youth movement, which flourished shortly before the turn of the twentieth century, the Harburg Group also felt drawn out of the city, which was increasingly characterized by factory buildings and tenement blocks, into unspoiled nature. This longing for an unadulterated environment was combined with the desire for a different set of values. These progressively oriented youths no longer wanted to be just appendages of adults. They were concerned with exchanging the paternalism of parents and teachers for a self-determined way of life.

When, after the November Revolution of 1918, the youth movement split into two large camps, Albert Voigt was one of those who advocated political reorientation and separated himself from those who sought a return to the Empire. With other young people, he spent many evenings at the association home in joyous or contemplative company and explored the North German landscape on countless hikes playing guitar and singing. The Klappholtal youth camp on Sylt and the Barkenhoff in Worpswede were among the hiking destinations. On the Island of Sylt, they studied and discussed Alfred Kurella’s Enlightenment writings, and in Worpswede, they were inspired by the commune of the painter Heinrich Vogeler, an experiment in which all participants renounced private property and committed themselves to mutual assistance.

In this circle of friends, the young Albert Voigts got to know and love the equally progressive thinking and acting Elfriede Paul. She was the daughter of a lithographer and a dressmaker. After attending the Harburg girls’ high school (Lyceum) located by the military cemetery, she studied education, and then found employment as a teacher at the free secular school on Maretstrasse. She was four years older than Albert Voigts. In 1924, the committed reform pedagogue was entrusted with the management of the children’s home and orphanage at Am Grosser Dahlen in Harburg, a task to which she devoted herself with great dedication.

The two young people watched closely the current events and believed that Karl Marx had found the right answers to the crisis of capitalism and imperialism as it became manifest at the end of the First World War. Already at the age of 17, young Albert Voigts read the classics of Marxism-Leninism with an enthusiasm that even his girlfriend could not escape. Through Max and Johanna Zorn, Albert Voigts and Elfriede Paul found their way to the KPD (Communist Party of Germany).

Their petty bourgeois origins and their previous adolescent life initially made it difficult for the two young Communists to find their bearings in the new environment. Before, they had wandered freely and unconstrained on field paths through the countryside, now they marched in solid formations with discipline behind the red flag through the streets of the industrial city of Harburg/Elbe. From then on, social action was more important than individual self-realization. Only over time did the new environment become familiar to them. In their private lives, they also remained inseparable friends when Albert Voigts studied engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig after graduating from high school.

In her new function as director of a children’s home and orphanage at Am Grossen Dahlen, Elfriede Paul gained deep insights into the social hardship of many working-class families on a daily basis. She did everything she could to afford the emaciated and lice-infested children new experiences. She lived, played, and worked together with the children and went with them on holidays, equipped with backpacks and cooking utensils, through the Lüneburg Heath or to the Baltic Sea. As much as she could help the children with her socio-pedagogical experience, as little could she do against the many diseases that weakened the children time after time. This realization reinforced her decision to study medicine and later to become a pediatrician at a sanatorium by the sea. After successfully obtaining her license to practice medicine and several intermediate stops in the health sector, she opened her own medical practice in 1936 on Sächsische Strasse in the upscale district of Berlin-Wilmersdorf.

That was also the year in which she met Walter Küchenmeister (9 Jan. 1897–13 May 1943), a trained lathe operator and subsequent writer. Before 1933, he had played a role as a Communist in Westphalia and soon won the affection of the young female doctor through his knowledge of cultural politics and literary works. In mid-Mar. 1937, he moved in with her.

Walter Küchenmeister was in turn a good friend of Harro Schulze-Boysen, an employee of the Reich Aviation Ministry, who, after 1939, had established a loose network of seven Berlin resistance groups through personal contacts with Arvid Harnack, a senior government councilor (Oberregierungsrat) in the Reich Economic Ministry. They included more than 150 opponents of Nazism of very different backgrounds and ideological traditions, coming from universities, musical and artistic milieus, journalism and administration, including many women. They were all united by their resolute opposition to Nazism.

Their resistance was many-sided. Some met for political and artistic discussion evenings; others gathered information about violent Nazi crimes or tried to assist persecuted people. In addition, the dissemination of information via leaflets and stickers was an important concern. In 1940/41, Schulze-Boysen and Harnack also succeeded in passing on important military information to Soviet agencies.

Albert Voigts, who had meanwhile completed his studies and found employment as a patent attorney candidate in the firm of the Berlin patent lawyer Dipl. Ing. Arthur Kuhn, remained in contact with Elfriede Paul, but did not belong to her new circle of friends. He used other means for his illegal activities, which, as a comrade confirmed later, he pursued "extremely conscientiously and discreetly.”

In the summer of 1942, the Gestapo uncovered the resistance organization around Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, after they had intercepted a radio message from the Soviet intelligence service to an agent in Brussels with the names and addresses of Harro Schultze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, and Adam Kuckhoffs, decoding it with considerable luck after some time. This agent had previously met with Harro Schultze-Boysen once. The German security authorities believed after their successful search operation that they had tracked down a large Soviet espionage organization, and gave this group of people the name "Red Orchestra” ("Rote Kapelle”).

In quick succession, more than 120 members of the Berlin group were arrested in August and Sept. 1942. Through interrogating or spying on them in their cells, another 80 people from this circle were then arrested.

On 16 Sept. 1942, Elfriede Paul and Walter Küchenmeister were picked up from their home. Exactly one month later, due to a Gestapo summons Albert Voigts had to report for interrogation in room 421 of the Berlin headquarters of the State Police on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse at 9.00 a.m. From there he did not return to his workplace and apartment. It was soon liquidated by a female employee of the law firm on the orders of the Gestapo.

Seventy-nine arrested persons were charged before the Reich Military Court on the instructions of the Reich Chancellery. The representative of the prosecution was Oberkriegsgerichtsrat (supreme Reich Court-Martial judge) Manfred Roeder, an ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler, who soon afterward earned questionable fame for his inhuman conduct of proceedings. In the trials, he dealt not only with the political activities of the accused, but also with their private lives in epic breadth, in order to denigrate them as immoral people. All trials were top secret. The defendants were assigned public defenders who were only allowed to speak to them shortly before the trial or not at all.

On 15 Dec. 1942, on Hitler’s orders, an iron rail with butcher’s hooks was installed in the execution room of the Berlin-Plötzensee prison. Until then, death sentences of military courts had been executed by shooting and those of civil courts by beheading with the guillotine. More than 70 members of the Schultze-Boysen/Harnack group were sentenced to death in Dec. 1942.

Walter Küchenmeister was sentenced to death by the Reich Court-Martial on 6 Feb. 1943 and beheaded on 13 May 1943 in Berlin-Plötzensee by guillotine. Elfriede Paul was sentenced to six years in prison. In Apr. 1945, she was liberated by American troops from the Leipzig/Klein-Meusdorf prison.

Albert Voigts was one of the few defendants to be acquitted by the Reich Court-Martial for lack of evidence. However, instead of leaving the building as a free man, he was taken back into custody by the Gestapo based on a "protective custody” ("Schutzhaft”) order and detained again before leaving the premises. The Gestapo official, with whom his boss subsequently inquired about his whereabouts, explained to him that his agency would not accept this acquittal and that Albert Voigts would remain in custody until the end of the war.

The prisoner was transferred from prison to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 21 May 1943. At that time, there were more than 23,000 inmates in this concentration camp – three times as many as at the beginning of the Second World War – without any corresponding expansion having been carried out in the meantime. Death and killing were omnipresent in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Thousands died there from exhaustion, lack of medical care, malnutrition, or the consequences of arbitrary and brutal abuse.

Less than five weeks after his admission to this concentration camp, Albert Voigts was no longer alive. Shortly after his thirty-ninth birthday, he died on 30 June 1943 in this place of horror.

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

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Komitee ehemaliger politischer Gefangener, Akte: Albert Voigts; Elfriede Paul, Ein Sprechzimmer der Roten Kapelle, Berlin 1981; die anderen. Widerstand und Verfolgung in Harburg und Wilhelmsburg, VVN-BdA Harburg (Hrsg.), 6. Auflage Harburg 2005; Harburger Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Bezirksamt Harburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg-Harburg 2003; AB Harburg-Wilhelmsburg und Landkreis 1938; https://hannover.vvn-bda.de/hfgf/h5-10-ElfriedePaul, eingesehen am 11.4.2018; https://de.wikipedia. org/wiki/Elfriede_Paul, eingesehen am 11.4.2018; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Küchenmeister, eingesehen am 11.4.2018; https://de.wikipedia.org./wiki/Albert_Voigts_(Widerstandskämpfer, eingesehen am 11.4.2018; https://www.gdw-berlin.de/vertiefung/themen/14-die-rote-kapelle, eingesehen am 11.4.2018; https://de.wikipedia.org./wiki/Rote_Kapelle, eingesehen am 12.4.2018; Stefan Roloff, Die Rote Kapelle, München 2002; Johannes Tuchel, Julia Albert, Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, in: Informationen zur politischen Bildung Nr. 330, Bonn 2016. Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen, Totenbuch.