Bernhard Bästlein

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Bernhard Bästlein (born 3 December 1894 in Hamburg; died 18 September 1944 in Brandenburg) was a German Communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime.

Bästlein's roots were in a social-democratic family, and he was a precision mechanic by trade. In 1911, he joined the Socialist Worker Youth, and in 1914 the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the First World War, he spent two years as a soldier on the Western Front. In 1918, he switched to the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), whose left wing became part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1920, taking Bästlein along with it. In 1921, he was elected to the Hamburgische Bürgerschaft, the legislature of the Land of Hamburg. In March 1921, Bästlein took part in the Märzkämpfe in Mitteldeutschland, a brief insurgency in central Germany. He was sought by the police and fled to the Soviet Union. Early in 1923, he came back to Germany and edited party newspapers in Dortmund, Hagen, Wuppertal, Remscheid and Solingen (in 1929, he was editor-in-chief of the Bergische Arbeiterstimme in Solingen). In 1929, he also became KPD deputy district leader in Düsseldorf, in 1931 political leader of the KPD Middle Rhine (Mittelrhein) district, and in 1932 a member of the Prussian Landtag.

In 1933, after Hitler had come to power, the Nazis arrested Bernhard Bästlein and sentenced him, for "conspiracy to commit high treason", to 20 months in labour prison (Zuchthaus), and after his time was up, they further gave him four years in Dachau, Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. He was released in 1939 or 1940, whereafter he eked out a livelihood as a car washer and driver in Hamburg. There, in 1941, he built, along with Comrade Abshagen, a communist resistance group, the Bästlein Organization, which was first active in the Hamburg shipyards, and which later boasted a network of contacts in northern Germany, in Flensburg, Kiel, Lübeck, Rostock and Bremen. These connections were each overseen by a single leader to lessen the chances of the whole network being exposed to the Nazi authorities. Nevertheless, in October 1942, Bästlein, along with many other members of the organization, was arrested and sent for sentencing in Berlin.

In November 1942, he justified his unlawful resistance to the Gestapo: In his seven years of penal servitude in the Zuchthaus and the concentration camps, he had experienced ghastly things; his "conviction that a social order in which such things are possible must be eliminated" thereby became solid. The war that began in 1939 had "awoken all memories of the 1914-1918 war and strengthened his conviction that as long as the capitalist social order existed, there would again and again be wars which would destroy all feeling in human society and likewise result in tremendous loss of material wealth."

An air raid on Plötzensee Prison in Berlin made it possible for Bästlein to escape in January 1944. He managed to forge a connection with the KPD's operational leadership under Anton Saefkow, and to help in the creation of an illegal network of the Free Germany Movement (Bewegung Freies Deutschland) in Berlin-Brandenburg. On 30 May 1944, he was once again arrested, on 5 August, he was sentenced to death, and on 18 September 1944, Bernhard Bästlein was put to death at the Brandenburg Zuchthaus.