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Claudius Gosau * 1892

Woltmanstraße 14 (Hamburg-Mitte, Hammerbrook)

HIER WOHNTE
CLAUDIUS GOSAU
JG. 1892
IM WIDERSTAND
VERHAFTET 1933
GEFÄNGNIS HEIDE
GEFÄNGNIS MOABIT
TODESURTEIL 11.2.1944
HINGERICHTET 6.3.1944
BRANDENBURG-GÖRDEN

Claudius Gosau, born 9.5.1892 in Blankenmoor/ Norderdithmarschen executed on 6.3.1944 in Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary

last residential address: Woltmannstraße 14

Claudius Gosau spent most of his life in his native area Dithmarschen, where he worked mainly as a construction worker. After participating in World War I, in which he was severely wounded four times, he lived in Heide with his wife Marianne and two children, Wilhelm and Irmgard.

It was not until 1938 that he moved with his family to Woltmannstraße 14 in Hamburg-Hammerbrook, presumably because the harassment to which he had been subjected in the small town of Heide because of his political 'convictions had become unbearable for him. He found work as a train driver on the premises of a private company in Bremen-Farge, where he was housed in a communal shelter and worked until his arrest in September 1943.

As early as the 1920s, he was politically active in the KPD, whose marching band he led in Heide, but from which he was expelled in 1930. Notwithstanding his exclusion from the party, he was imprisoned in Heide for a few days in the police prison for political reasons in April 1933.

It is not known that he later became active in organized political resistance. However, he held discussions with his fellow workers, which included foreign forced laborers, about the course of the war, during which he is reported to have said that Germany could not win the war, that the Nazi regime's news about Stalingrad was false, and that the "scoundrel" Hitler was to blame for the war.

After being arrested on the basis of a denunciation on September 17, 1943, Claudius Gosau was taken to the Berlin-Moabit prison via a Bremen prison and charged by the Chief Reich Prosecutor at the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof), Lautz, on December 8, 1943, on the grounds that he "had acted in a manner substituting for the armed forces by making communist and defeatist statements to his fellow workers, thereby at the same time favoring the enemies of the Reich and preparing communist high treason."

He was sentenced to death by the People's Court on February 11, 1944, and beheaded in the Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary on March 6, 1944.

His urn was buried in the grove of honor of Hamburg resistance fighters at the Ohlsdorf cemetery in 1946.

Claudius Gosau did not remain the only victim of National Socialist persecution in his family - his son Wilhelm (born July 13, 1916), who had remained in Holstein as a farm laborer, was deported to Auschwitz "for educational reasons" and died there on July 6, 1943.

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: January 2022
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: AfW, Entschädigungsakte; Webseite des Staatlichen Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, www.auschwitz.org.pl, Informationssuche Sterbeurkunde und E-Mail dess. v. 5.8.2005; VAN (Hg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter, Hamburg 1968; AB 1940-43; Hochmuth, Ursel, Niemand und nichts wird vergessen. Biogramme und Briefe Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer 1933 1945, Hamburg 2005.