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Max Kresse * 1891

Heinrich-Grone-Stieg Ecke Sachsenfeld (Hamburg-Mitte, Hammerbrook)

Verhaftet 1933, 1934 und 1938
wegen Bettelns
Flucht in den Tod
02.08.1939

further stumbling stones in Heinrich-Grone-Stieg Ecke Sachsenfeld:
Eduard Falkenau

Bruno Otto Max Kresse, born 3 Aug. 1891, death by suicide 2 Aug. 1939

Corner of Heinrich-Grone-Stieg and Sachsenfeld (formerly the Salvation Army Men’s Home, Gustavstraße 12)

Max Kresse was born in 1891 in Potsdam. Between 1929 and 1938, he was arrested and sent to prison for begging a total of eleven times. His last arrest was on 22 June 1938, and he was sentenced to five weeks in prison. When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, it immediately began a campaign against the "nuisance of beggary.” Beggars and the homeless were registered as "anti-social” or as "social undesirables” and monitored by the police. "Social welfare counseling,” commitment to institutions, and the heightened severity of legal penalties were meant to force them to return to "regular work.” In September 1933, 1400 beggars were put into "protective custody” in Hamburg. Of them, more than 100 were sent to the Farmsen Care Home. From 1934 onwards, the Hamburg Social Welfare Office "counseled” more than 5700 of these persons. In June 1938 there was a Reich-wide arrest wave of "shirkers,” "anti-social elements,” and persons with previous convictions. 700 people were arrested in Hamburg and sent to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

Max Kresse repeatedly found himself in prison during this coordinated action of the Social Welfare Office and the police. He was only spared the concentration camp because he was already in the Fuhlsbüttel prison in 1938 when the wave of arrests took place.

When he was released from Fuhlsbüttel, he was sent to the Vechta Penitentiary and Work House. He apparently no longer wanted to live under these conditions. After his release he returned to Hamburg, and two or three months later, on August 1939, he jumped from a window of the Salvation Army Men’s Home on Gustavstraße 12 (present-day Heinrich-Grone-Stieg).

Translator: Amy Lee

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Bernhard Rosenkranz/Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaHH, 331-5, Polizeibehörde – Unnatürliche Sterbefälle, 407/40; StaHH,, 242-1II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferungen 13 und 16.