Eugen Wiedmaier

Eugen Wiedmaier (16 November 1900 – 14 March 1940) was a German political activist and party official (KPD) who engaged in anti-fascist resistance after 1933. Following six years in solitary confinement, he died while detained at the main penitentiary in Ludwigsburg, during the first part of 1940. The death was reported as a suicide.

Life Eugen Wiedmaier was born into a working-class family in Zuffenhausen, then just outside Stuttgart to the north. He attended school locally and then undertook commercial training. He worked for a succession of businesses as a sales representative till 1932. (For the Communist Party, "Anti-militarist Work" involved extensive international liaison with Communist parties in various European countries and, for the Communist Party of Germany, extensive "party intelligence" work on the domestic front.) She came to the partnership with a son from her first marriage, but there is no mention of any children born from the marriage of Eugen and Maria Wiedmaier. In December 1934 he faced the usual charge, under circumstances of this kind, of preparing to commit high treason (Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat). and was sentenced by the in Karlsruhe to a thirty-month jail term. Several other prominent local communists were convicted and sentenced at the same time. Communist networks after 1933 were by definition highly secretive, making their detailed operational arrangements hard to determine for the authorities and, indeed, for subsequent researchers. In 1936 major trial took place at Kalrsruhe following the identification of a surviving network. Although he had by this time been incarcerated for more than two years, Wiedmaier was among those tried, convicted and sentenced. In practical terms, this could be seen as a retrial: it involved an increase of the jail sentence he was already serving to a total length of twelve and a half years.

Eugen Wiedmaier died at the main penitentiary in Ludwigsburg, during the first part of 1940. Sources differ over whether the death was a suicide or a murder.