Augustin Sandtner

Augustin "Gustl" Sandtner (8 August 1893 – 11 October 1944) was a German communist politician and anti-war activist who served, briefly, as a member of the Landtag of Prussia. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he campaigned for several weeks against fascism and war. Following his arrest he survived more than eleven of the twelve years of Nazi rule in state captivity, but was shot dead at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitaries a few months before the end of the Second World War.

Life Augustin Sandtner was born in Munich on 8 August 1893. His father worked as a marble cutter/grinder. "Gustl" trained for work in a bakery. In 1911 he became an organiser in the "Bakers and Pastry Makers Trades Union". In 1912 he was conscripted to undertake his military service in the Imperial German Navy. During World War I he joined the "International Group" and the "Spartacus League" which grew out of it. As a member of the crew on the Battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz he organised (illegal) revolutionary groups and distributed anti-war literature. On 3 November 1918 he participated in the Kiel mutiny which triggered a year of insurrections across Germany. A few days later he led a delegation of the Kiel sailors south to Munich where he was elected a member of the Soldiers' and Workers' Council. He was elected chair of the workers' council at BMW. In 1922 he was sentenced to three and a half years' imprisonment because of his involvement in organising solidarity support for the Communist-led insurrections in central Germany in March of the previous year. The political backdrop changed with the Nazi take-over in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. The Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933 was immediately blamed on "communists", and it was indeed those members (and former members) of the KPD who had not already gone into hiding or fled abroad who found themselves heading the government's political targets list. Augustin Sandtner spent the first part of 1933 in the border regions of Silesia organising joint rallies by Germany, Polish and Czechoslovak workers opposed to fascism and the looming risks of war. Augustin Sandtner was arrested in Breslau (now Wrocław) on 27 April 1933. In January 1934 he was sentenced to a three year prison term. At the end of the three year term he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Celebration Some of the streets named after "communist heroes" in the days of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were renamed following German reunification in 1990. However, Augustin Sandtner is still (2017) commemorated on the Berlin street map by Augustin-Sandtner-Straße in the city's Oranienburg quarter. There is also a Gustl-Sandtner-Straße in Teltow on Berlin's southern edge.

During the East German period an army engineering regiment, the Ingenieurbauregiment 2 Augustin Sandtner, specialising in construction-engineering (including the building of large scale nuclear bunkers such as strategic command posts) was also named after Augustin Sandtner. The unit was also known by the unit designation IBR 2. In NVA nomenclature IBR was shorthand for Ingenieurbauregiment (Engineer Construction Regiment).