Bernhard Bästlein

Bernhard Bästlein (; 3 December 1894 – 18 September 1944) was a German Communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime. He was imprisoned very shortly after the Nazis seized power in 1933 and was imprisoned almost without interruption until his execution in 1944, by the Nazis. Nonetheless, he was one of the most important leaders of German Resistance.

Early years

Bernhard Karl Bästlein was born the fourth of five children to Bernhard Bästlein Sr. of Thuringia and Cornelia Bästlein, née Kock, of East Friesland. His father came from a family of toymakers and gunsmiths and worked as a gunsmith and safe builder. He was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and an avid trade union member. After grammar school, Bästlein was trained as a precision mechanic. At the same time, he took evening classes at a worker's education school and the Volkshochschule.

In 1911, Bästlein finished his training as a mechanic and joined the Socialist Workers Youth Party (Sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend), where he met his future wife, the seamstress Johanna Elisabeth Hermine Berta Zenk, daughter of Wilhelmine (née Schröder) and Albert Zenk, a working-class family and Social Democrats. In 1917, he began to write articles about the revolutionary developments then taking place in Russia. Writing under the pen name, "Berne Bums", he took a position of peace through revolution. On returning to civilian life, he was elected to a council of workers and soldiers in November 1918 and he began writing as the "worker correspondent" for the Hamburg Peoples' Press, a volunteer position. He also switched his party affiliation to the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) because of the SPD's stance on war bonds to help pay for World War I.

After 1933 Bernhard Bästlein was elected to the Reichstag on 5 March 1933, but this was the election that brought the Nazis to greater power in the government and he was never able to fulfill his duties. In April 1939, he was sent to the Cologne prison, , where he stayed in police custody till 6 April 1940. Returning to his family, then living at Goldbekufer 19 in Hamburg, he worked as a car washer and driver, then later in Altona, at Riepe-Werken, making ballpoint pens.

He helped create an illegal network of the Free Germany Movement (Bewegung Freies Deutschland) in Berlin-Brandenburg. But on 30 May 1944 he was once again arrested. He was brought to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße and tortured for days. In July, he was sent back to Sachsenhausen.

He was sentenced to death on 5 September 1944 for the crimes of conspiracy to commit high treason, aiding the enemy and undermining military strength. The sentencing document states, "You are unteachable and unreformable." Bästlein was executed on 18 September 1944 at Brandenburg-Görden Prison. There is also a street named for him in Rostock. There is a stolperstein for Bastlein in the north of Hamburg, at Goldbekufer 19, where Bästlein once lived.