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Ehepaar Golda und Horst Fröhlich
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Horst Fröhlich * 1891

Fruchtallee 115 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

HIER WOHNTE
HORST FRÖHLICH
JG. 1891
IM WIDERSTAND / KPD
VERHAFTET 1935
ZUCHTHAUS FUHLSBÜTTEL
DEPORTIERT 1942
AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET 4.1.1943

further stumbling stones in Fruchtallee 115:
Oskar Helle, Alice Reinmann, Julius Reinmann

Horst Fröhlich, born on 19 July 1891, arrested, in the Resistance, deported on 1942 to Auschwitz, murdered there on 4 Jan. 1943

Fruchtallee 115 (formerly Fruchtallee 77)

Horst Fröhlich’s motto was that he would remain a "Communist for life and act according to the rules of the Communist Party. Being Jewish he was unable to support the new Germany.”

Horst Fröhlich was born in Ratibor (today Racibórz in Poland) on 19 July 1891, the child of the Jewish married couple Siegfried Fröhlich and his wife Rosalie, née Cracauer. His father worked as a sales representative and later operated a cigar factory in Ratibor. Horst’s sister Ilse was born on 14 May 1898 in Ratibor.

Horst attended high school in Ratibor, passed the graduation exam (Abitur) in 1910, and studied medicine in Munich, Freiburg, and Berlin. He was drafted to serve in the army in 1914 and was able to use his medical studies to provide medical services during World War I. He was promoted to assistant military doctor and was awarded the Honor Cross Second Class for this. The horrors of the war then prompted him to become politically active.

From 1918 onward, he dealt with political issues, when he was forced to withdraw due to dysentery. The writings of the Spartacus League persuaded him to join that group in 1919. He published his first Communist newspaper and quarreled with his parents, because they did not share his views at first.
In 1920, he moved to Frankfurt/Main and opened a bookstore, which he ran until 1922. He received the money to start the business from Goldine Hartog, whom he had met in Frankfurt/Main. The two got married there on 10 Nov. 1920. Goldine was born on 7 June 1889, the daughter of Albert Hartog and Johanna Holländer in Haaren, Aachen District.

Goldine, or Golda as she was often called, contracted pulmonary tuberculosis in 1922, and Horst enabled her to stay at a health spa. She too was a member of the Spartacus League, the German Communist Party (KPD), had belonged to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Chemnitz, and she was a correspondent for Derutra (German-Russian Transportation Corporation), to name but a few of her fields of activity.
Horst worked as a journalist, contributing primarily to the media of the Communist Party. In addition, he wrote several monographs on questions of cultural policy and cultural history, as well as on issues of religion and social development in early history. He was also active as a functionary of the KPD in cultural-political institutions and organizations of the KPD.

Like his wife Golda, Horst applied for a position at the Moscow-based Marx-Engels-Lenin-Institute. In 1931, both received a position in Moscow and in 1932, they moved from Berlin to the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Institute in Moscow in the Soviet Union.

Golda changed her field of activity several times. She was evacuated from Russia to Tashkent after the war began. In Dec. 1941, a former colleague from the institute met her again in Tashkent. She felt responsible for Golda and put her on a train to Osh (Kyrgyzstan) so that she could be accommodated in an emigrants’ home there. The institute colleague was the last person to see Golda alive. After that, all traces of her disappeared. She was declared dead at the end of the war.

The political turn in Germany caused Horst Fröhlich increasing concern and so he was sent back to Germany in 1934 to work illegally according to his own wishes and the decision of the KPD. In October, he entered Germany illegally across the Czechoslovakian border. His main task was the management of illegal work in the "Wasserkante” area of the KPD based in Hamburg. His comrades made this possible by making their apartments available to him. He lived under various aliases, for example "Der Alte,” "Dr. Berger,” or mostly "Redakteur.” Under his direction, the illegal magazines Rundschau and Hamburger Volkszeitung were printed, for which he also made substantial contributions in terms of content.

Betrayal then led to a major wave of arrests by the Gestapo in Hamburg, in the course of which Horst was also apprehended on 7 Mar. 1935. The arrest took place at Fruchtallee 77, in the apartment of the door attendant Wilhelm Ackermann. The Gestapo had discovered this illegal quarter, arrested Ackermann the day before, and occupied the apartment until Horst ran into the trap. He was accused of "having prepared the treasonous enterprise of forcibly changing the Reich’s constitution” through his activities abroad and his illegal magazines entitled Leninist and Pressedienst during his Hamburg period underground.

This was followed by pretrial detention, indictment, and trial before the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). On 8 Dec. 1936, the verdict was pronounced: 15 years in prison. When his sentence was handed down, he uttered the words quoted at the beginning. Horst remained steadfast during his imprisonment and represented his political convictions offensively. A Gestapo document comments, "Both reports [articles in the above-mentioned illegal writings, B.L.] were obviously (written) by the editor, the Jew Horst Fröhlich, in prison, but under no circumstances can he be made to talk.”

Horst Fröhlich was taken to the Oslebshausen concentration camp near Bremen and had to glue bags. The well-read and linguistically talented man suffered from this monotonous work. Years of imprisonment in Fuhlsbüttel ensued. Rarely were personal contacts to the outside world permitted, only to his parents living in Frankfurt and, by letter, to his wife Golda, who lived in Moscow.

Horst Fröhlich wrote to his parents, "Until the end of my life, I will remember the few minutes of our last get-together. And even though as a prisoner, I cannot write a single line, cannot speak a word, without strangers’ eyes reading it and strangers’ ears hearing it, I felt in those few minutes, like a hot wave, all the deep and warm love of my parents’ home, which surrounded and protected me from childhood until now, in distant lands and here in the stone barred coffin. And if I have caused you much grief and worry, it is not for naught, it is for a goal worth staking it all, for the creation of a new humanity in which all human energies will unfold freely and in solidarity without war and violence.”
Then it was back to gluing bags again. A supervisor wrote in his evaluation, "Fröhlich is disciplined and diligent, and glues a neat bag.”

In prison, Horst Fröhlich began to work on mathematical problems. He set himself the goal of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, a hypothesis that had been put forward by the mathematician Fermat 350 years earlier (which could only be proved in 1994).

His mail was opened, read, and censored and often enough arbitrarily withheld. From the letters he sent to his family, it was clear that he was worried about his parents and their fate. In fact, on 1 Sept. 1942, they were deported from Frankfurt to Theresienstadt and murdered there in 1942 and 1943, respectively.

In 1942, this fate also hit Horst Fröhlich, because in that year, all Jewish prisoners were deported from prisons and penitentiaries to extermination camps. He was deported to Auschwitz on 10 Dec. 1942. It sounds like purest cynicism when the prison record noted, "Once the prisoner has been handed over to the police, his punishment is considered interrupted.” From Auschwitz, he was further deported to the Golleschau subcamp (today Goleszow in Poland).

In Golleschau, a former cement factory that the SS had taken over, the prisoners toiled either in quarries or in the construction of lines and tracks. It is questionable whether Horst could still be deployed in these jobs, for he died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on 4 Jan. 1943. His mortal remains were burned in one of the four crematoria of Auschwitz.

Horst Fröhlich’s sister Ilse survived. In Berlin, she had married Arthur Seehof and moved with him to France. In 1938, they relocated to Mallorca, then to Switzerland because of the Spanish Civil War, and in 1951 to Israel. In 1955, she returned to Frankfurt, where she passed away at the age of 86.

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

Stand: December 2020
© Bruno Stadler/Bärbel Klein

Quellen: StaH; 241-1 I_2139, 351-11_20921, 242-1 II_3874; Rußland; RGASPI; BdaB; R3017/32123, DY30/IV2/11/4971, NY4132, NY4130/60, NY4250/6, R3018/8994; BdaB; R58/2027, R/2190, R58/3230, R58/3232, R3017/28040, RY1/12/3-R1/12/3/13-20; Heirat 1854 Frankfurt am Main; Sterbeurkunde Auschwitz 269/1943.