Wartenberg, Gerhard

Gerhard Wartenberg was born in Tannroda/Thuringia on February 1, 1904, the son of a self-employed sign painter. He joined an anarcho-syndicalist youth group at an early age, and in 1927 he became a member of the Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union. In 1926 he studied chemistry in Leipzig and received his doctorate in 1928. From the fall of 1929 to mid-1930, he worked as a chemist for the French company "Produits photographiques et plastiques," which had a production facility in Pereslavl near Moscow. Back in Berlin, he married Käthe Pietzuch, and a daughter was born. From 1930 to 1932, Gerhard Wartenberg was head of the FAUD's reading group, the "Bücher-Gilde," as well as a member of the FAUD's Executive Commission and editor of the magazine "Syndikalist" and "Arbeiter-Echo. On May 20, 1933, he received a two-month prison sentence for two articles contained therein, but the sentence was amnestied. In 1932, under the pseudonym H. W. Gerhard, he published the FAUD brochure "Über Hildburghausen ins dritte Reich. Because of the far-sighted analysis of the fascist system elaborated in this brochure, it was banned. On March 9, 1933, the office of the FAUD, which was located at the Märkische Ufer, was occupied and Gerhard Wartenberg was only able to escape the threatened arrest by chance. He lived illegally with his aunt at Tempelhofer Dorfstraße 25 (today Alt Tempelhof 9-11) until he fled to Erfurt at the end of 1933. He then stayed with his parents in Leipzig. On May 7, 1937, he was arrested and on April 6, 1938, sentenced to five years in prison. Even before his release, he was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was murdered on December 22, 1942.