August Schmidt
* 1884

August Friedrich Schmidt, born 7/13/1884 in Königsaue near Quedlinburg, died on 8/3/1939 in Hamburg of the effects of imprisonment.

For four years, August Schmidt was a Communist member of the Hamburg City Council. Born in Königsaue near Quedlinburg, he absolved elementary school and then worked as a farm hand. In 1906, he moved to Hamburg, where found work at a shipyard; later, he found a job at the State Docks. In 1907, when Hamburg was a stronghold of the Social Democrats and the labor unions, he joined the SPD; he was also a member of the Union of Port Workers, one of Hamburg’s largest trade unions.

At the end of World War I, August Schmidt switched to the USPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party an organization that had seceded from the Social Democrats in protest against their support of Germany’s war effort. For a time, August Schmidt was a regional leader of the USPD. At the end of 1920, Schmidt and the majority of the Hamburg USPD members switched to the KPD, the Communist party lead by Ernst Thälmann. From 1927 to 1931, August Schmidt represented the KPD in the Hamburg City Council, where he was a devoted advocate of the interests of the port workers. A member of the Port Expansion Committee, he worked on planning construction projects. In addition, he belonged to the grievance committee for the housing agency.

August Schmidt had been engaged in the Rote Hilfe (“Red Aid”), a KPD-oriented organization that supported imprisoned members of the Communist party, trade unionists and other political prisoners and their dependents. At the end of 1920s, Schmidt helped organize the Revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsopposition (RGO) – “Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition. Together with the newly founded “United Organization of Seamen, Stevedores and Inland Sailors of Germany”, August Schmidt joined in organizing strikes in the Port of Hamburg.

When Rudolf Wissel, Prussian cabinet minister and member of the Universal German Trade Union (ADGB), declared the labor dispute terminated after 14 weeks without the strikers having achieved any results, a part of the workers continued the strike, whereupon the police took hard action against the strikers. In the city council, August Schmidt harshly attacked Social Democratic Chief of Police for this.

After the Reichstag Fire in February 1933, Reich President Hindenburg’s “Emergency Decree for the Protection of the People and the State” the Communist Party was suppressed. August Schmidt continued working in the now illegal KPD; until his arrest on September 17th, 1935, he was head of the Winterhude district chapter. After months of remand, Schmidt was sentenced to two years in prison in 1936. The circumstances of his death remain unclear. He is said to have been severely marked when he was released from prison and died on August 3rd, 1939.

The original building at Geibelstrasse 24 no longer exists, but the adjoining old houses give an impression of how August Schmidt might have lived. In 1995, the Hamburg city council published a brochure in memory of the “victims of totalitarian persecution”, wherein the author Frank Müller portrayed Schmidt’s life and work.

In the staircase leading to the plenary chamber of Hamburg’s town hall, there is a memorial plaque for the “victims of totalitarian persecution” It makes no mention of the names of the members of the town council who fell victim to the National Socialist persecution.

“Red” Geibelstrasse

Like quite a few other streets in working-class neighborhoods, “red” Geibelstrasse was a thorn in the side of the Nazis. On May 1st, 1933, the women there displayed their red bedticks as flags by airing them in the windows. Contemporary witnesses recall that Nazi storm troopers repeatedly raided apartments in Geibelstrasse to search them and abduct suspects.

Translation by Peter Hubschmid 2018
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.