Willy Sachse

Willy Sachse (7 January 1896 – 21 August 1944) was a German socialist and communist who took part in the Sailors' Revolt at the end of the First World War. He remained politically involved during the 1920s and later became a writer. Drawn back into political activism during the early 1940s, he died by execution at the Brandenburg Prison.

Life Willy Sachse was born in Leipzig. Karl Arthur Sachse, his father, was a cooper at the time of his birth, but by 1918 his parents were running a guest house in Thuringia.

On 6 March 1926 the "Hamburger Echo", a Social Democratic newspaper, published exerts from a grovelling letter which Sachse was said to have sent to the Kaiser in 1917, begging for mercy in respect of the death sentence he received that year. Sachse always insisted that no such letter had been written by him, but his reputation within the party was nevertheless tarnished and he lost his place on the party central committee. His position with the Hamburg party also became difficult, and he left the city, moving back to Leipzig, in or before May 1926. In January 1926 the publication was confiscated. books were published, of which six were published in 1934 alone. Given the size of the books and the way in which they appear to have been carefully crafted, sources suggest that even a well practiced novelist would have needed around one year to produce each one, which gives rise to speculation that many the books were written during the 1920s, but the author only got round to finding a publisher for them after removing himself from political involvement. The books were even translated for sale in French. Despite meeting with some success commercially, Sachse was excluded from the government sponsored Reich Chamber of Literature after he turned down the idea that he should write a book about sea travel "with a Nazi flavour" (" ... über die Seefahrt im nationalsozialistischen Sinne").

In 1939 he took a job as a technical draftsman with a chemical factory. Shortly after this he got to know Beppo Römer, to whom he seems to have been recommended by Alexander Stenbock-Fermor. Through Römer, Sachse took on leadership of the "North Group" of the Berlin-based "Revolutionäre Arbeiter und Soldaten" ("Revolutionary Workers and Soldiers" / RAS) resistance group, which Römer had set up in the early summer of 1940. Available sources are silent on what the group did, but by September 1941 it comprised more than 200 people, with connections to similar organisations in Leipzig, Munich, Vienna, Innsbruck and Essen. Sachse was identified at that time as one of the group's three leaders. The RAS came under Gestapo surveillance, and on 2 February 1942 he was one of 66 group members arrested. By this stage his son, Werner Sachse, had already been killed in the war. Willy Sachse spent two years held in investigatory detention in police prisons and concentration camps. He was condemned to death by the special "People's Court" on 7 June 1944 and executed (shot) at the Brandenburg Prison on 21 August 1944.