Heinrich Friedetzky: One story among so many

The youngest of the eight children of a railway worker, Heinrich Friedetzky was born in Bebra in Hesse on 8 October 1910. His mother died in 1913 and his father in 1920. From 1912 on the family lived in Ratibor (Upper Silesia, now part of Poland) where Heinrich lived with his brothers and sisters and stepmother. At the age of 14 he quit school and started a three and a half year apprenticeship as an electrician. After a reading of the pamphlet Moses or Darwin? he severed all connection with Catholicism and at the age of 18 he joined the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschland (FAUD - Free Workers’ Union of Germany).

In Ratibor the FAUD had an enormous following at the time, just as it did pretty much all over Germany, although from 1923 on it began to lose more and more members: by 1928 the Ratibor local group still had 60 members. Anarchist books were passed from hand to hand and plays were staged which is how Heinrich was able to complete his self-education. The local group was also the one that launched the Schwarze Scharen (Black Bands), an armed antifascist self-defence group at the beginning of the 1930s. Workers with no party affiliations served in the Schwarze Scharen alongside FAUD members. The Ratibor Schwarze Scharen made quite a name for itself and was the model for anarcho-syndicalists elsewhere.

In May 1932 the police stumbled upon huge amounts of explosives in Beuthen (Upper Silesia). Faced with the threat of jail, three FAUD militants from the Schwarze Scharen - Alfons Malina, Bernhard Pacha and Paul Czakon - managed to escape to Spain. After a time, partly in a search for adventure and partly missing their comrades and to make contact with the mighty Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement, Adolf Wlodarz, Max Piechulla and Heinrich Friedetzky hiked all the way to Barcelona and back again to Upper Silesia in May 1933.

In the meantime Hitler had become chancellor of the Reich and the fascist terror had escalated. In the summer of 1936, by which point most anarchists had gone to ground and every premises liable to attack had been shut down, a local FAUD group in Upper Silesia fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

Heinrich was working as an electrician at the time and in the summer of 1937 he made up his mind to go to Spain to support the revolution. The Gestapo got wind of this in December and issued a warrant for his arrest. Along with Max Piechulla, Heinrich hiked across Czechoslovakia, Austria and Switzerland to Perpignan in southern France, staying overnight with Fritz Brupbacher in Zurich and Luigi Bertoni in Geneva. On arrival in Perpignan they were told by the local anarchists that the border with Spain had become harder to cross some time back. Max and Heinrich soon realised that the anarcho-syndicalist organisations looking after entry into Spain were now less interested in personnel than in arms, medicines and other war materials: the need for volunteer fighters had passed.

As a result, the pair made for Paris, From there they made it to Spain with the help of the Communist Party’s Comité Rouge, passing themselves off as trade unionists; once in Barcelona they meant to seek out the CNT-FAI. 

Because of an air raid, their train was forced to halt en route for some hours and because of the time lost it did not make a stop in Barcelona but proceeded to Valencia. Which is how the pair found themselves suddenly dispatched to the front lines to serve with an International Brigade. The Communist commander, however, smelled a rat, so much so that he left behind a note that the two FAUD militants travelling incognito were Nazi spies. His note sits today in the German State Archives. However, when he realised who the pair really were, he told them: “I knew you were anarchists. But, anarchists making the best fighters, you can join the International Brigades. But, after the victory, you will be shot!” Which is how two German anarchists came to serve with the International Brigades. In February 1938, after some training, they were moved up to the front lines. Barely one month later they were forced to fall back near Alcañiz and were captured by Italian troops, which was a stroke of luck for them, as Franco’s troops were no longer taking any prisoners.

Max and Heinrich were now sent to San Pedro de Cardena, a monastery used as a prison. Lest they be sent back to Germany, Max, who spoke Polish, passed himself off as a Pole whilst Heinrich who spoke Czech passed himself off as a Czech. But whilst things went fine for Max, Heinrich was not so lucky because along came the Munich Agreement and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. After questioning by the Gestapo, Heinrich was deported to Germany, since he claimed to be a Sudeten German. Once in Germany his true identity was revealed and in September 1939 he was sentenced to a two year prison term as a “fighter for Red Spain”, first in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and later in Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Since he was useful, being an electrician, he fortunately survived but was not spared the anguish of torture. Along with a few others he was freed at the end of April in 1945. Utterly disillusioned with Communists after his experiences in Spain and in the concentration camps, he decided not to go home to Silesia which had in the meantime become a Soviet occupation zone. He settled in Lübeck and lived with his wife and three children, an active member of the Concentration Camp Inmates’ Committee, a non-party antifascist grouping. 

For a brief while he was in touch with the Föderation Freiheitlicher Sozialisten (FFS - Libertarian Socialist Federation) which had been set up after the war and which advocated a libertarian municipalism. But shortly after, he left it, subsequently relying upon a few old friends, especially Augustin Souchy, who also came from Ratibor.  At the beginning of the 1990s an anarchist historian came across his name at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and called on Heinrich in Lübeck. Shortly after that, his wife’s death and a lengthy illness led to Heinrich’s moving to Cologne in 1993 to be near a grandson. 

A week before the opening of the Libertarian Festival in Frankfurt in April 1993, the aforesaid historian telephoned Cologne to report that an old anarchist from Lübeck had moved into our area. We soon made contact with Heinrich and within days Heinrich was in the University of Frankfurt auditorium for the inaugural meeting of the Libertarian Festival, bringing us his greetings.

He liked to chat with the very young, so we invited him to attend the weekly meetings of the Cologne anarchist group, in which he really delighted, partly because the talk was often of contemporary matters. Even though he had less interest in the past than in the present and future we got him to do some interviews about his own life. It was a delight to know him because this was an elderly man with his eyes on the future but who was able at the same time to invoke his own life experiences. Once we asked him what an evening with the Ratibor local FAUD group had been like and he replied: “That’s just what I wanted to tell you. The meeting took place between 8 o’clock and precisely 10 o’clock. By 10, all of the important business had to be out of the way because some were already getting ready to leave to rejoin their families or because they had to be up early for the first shift. During the first half hour current affairs were discussed then about an hour and a half was spent on our angle on the world (i.e. anarchist matters) leaving 10 minutes for organisation business. What could not be organised in 10 minutes was not worth doing anyway.”

At around that time Heinrich also took part in other anarchist gatherings in Germany, Spain and Holland, spoke in squats and travelled around giving interviews. At the beginning of 1994 however he fell seriously ill and it was plain to him that he would not survive another northern winter. So he asked us if he might possibly recuperate in Spain, on account of his memories and because the red wine there was so good.

With the aid of an atlas, he picked out Alicante and thanks to the assistance of the CNT-FAI a young family was found that agreed to take Heinrich in for four winters. Whilst others only 25 years old become stick-in-the-muds, at his advanced age Heinrich was delighted to be trying out a new language and a new culture. “As an anarchist, I am at home anywhere; anyway, my whole life long, I have felt out of place.”

In Alicante he would often go in the evenings to the CNT premises, but he was somewhat dissatisfied because the old folks there talked of nothing but 1936 whereas his interest lay in the present day. Once, on his return from a CNT national congress, he also said: “They don’t even strike me as real anarchists because when a vote is taken they are 95% of them all of the same opinion.” He himself was an anarchist from head to toe (and, for tactical reasons, as he used to say, an anarcho-syndicalist).

On 14 May 1998 Heinrich Friedetzky died after returning from Alicante. It is hard to say how much he is missed. We experience someone but descriptions are only ever approximations. A man who had been in the anarchist movement for seventy years, who survived prison and dangerous times, has an immense contribution to offer, more than any historian can ever cobble together. So let us look out for our old folks, not just the anarchists but also our own grandparents and neighbours!

I should like to close with something that Heinrich would often say: “The lowliest turd of democracy means more to me than dictatorship in all its splendour.” 

Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli, No 16, December 2000, pp. 39-41.

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.