Maschmeyer, Heinrich

Police director, resistance fighter, local politician

Born: 14.06.1885 in Frankfurt-Oberrad

died: 10.06.1945 in Wiesbaden

Heinrich Maschmeyer joined the Offenbach police force in 1907 and was promoted to police commissioner in 1913. He took part in the First World War from August 1, 1914 until the end. He had been a member of the SPD since 1919, and of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold since it was founded in 1924. He left this non-partisan organization, which was clearly dominated by the SPD, in 1930 when he moved to Worms to take up the post of police director.

In March 1933, Maschmeyer was arrested by the National Socialists and imprisoned in Osthofen concentration camp. There he was locked in a cell together with communists from Worms, also mistreated on several occasions and temporarily placed in solitary confinement in the local district court prison. During his imprisonment, he suffered his first heart attack. Having previously been granted leave of absence for political reasons, he was dismissed from the service in mid-1933, initially without entitlement to a pension. He soon moved to Frankfurt am Main, and finally to Wiesbaden in 1934.

For a time, he made a living for his family and himself with a wholesale grocery business. Although his widow Sofie Maschmeyer and her daughter Hanni Vollmer stated in a questionnaire for the US military government in 1945 that he had been politically persecuted by the Nazi regime but had not been a member of a banned opposition party or group, Maschmeyer had nevertheless been active in anti-Nazi activities as part of the conspiratorial network of social democratic and trade unionist confidants set up by the former Hessian Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Leuschner and his colleagues throughout the Reich.

As head of the Wiesbaden base of this resistance structure, he had been in constant contact not least with its regional leaders, such as the former Hessian State Councillor Ludwig Schwamb, who was executed on January 23, 1945 for his involvement in the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, and his friend and relative, the later Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of the Interior and Social Affairs Jakob Steffan. Maschmeyer must also have had contact with non-Social Democratic opposition circles, which would also have been called upon for the necessary political reorganization work if the coup had succeeded.

In any case, immediately after the US troops marched in, he became involved in the Wiesbaden Reconstruction Committee, which was immediately formed to represent the anti-Nazi forces and was rooted in a local non-party resistance group around the later CDU treasurer Heinrich Roos. Maschmeyer's early death was probably a late consequence of the damage to his health suffered during his Nazi imprisonment. His urn was buried in the family grave in Offenbach am Main. The Wiesbaden city archives hold a collection of material about Heinrich Maschmeyer.