Joseph Götz (15.11.1895 Munich – 9.5.1933 Dachau Concentration Camp)

After finishing his apprenticeship as a locksmith, Joseph Götz went traveling in 1913, settled in Mannheim, but was conscripted into the Navy in 1915. In 1917, Joseph Götz took part in the mass protests by sailors against the war, was sentenced to many years of penal servitude by the Reich Court Martial for mutiny, but was freed from Celle penitentiary by revolutionary sailors during the November Revolution. He returned to Munich, where he took part in the defense of the Soviet Republic as a member of the Red Army.

Götz then went back to work as a locksmith, formed a trade union and was elected to the works council. A member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) since 1919, he was employed as a trade union secretary at the Southern Bavaria district administration in 1923 and elected to the State Parliament in 1924. Götz had been arrested and detained multiple times since October 1923 for organizing communist gatherings banned in Bavaria and was sentenced to a multi-year prison term in 1926, but he avoided the sentence by escaping to the Soviet Union. Following his amnesty, he returned to Munich in 1928.

As the organizational leader of the Bavarian KPD, he had already been living in illegal quarters since the National Socialists had come to power, including in Oskar Maria Graf’s apartment in Hohenzollernstraße in Schwabing. Graf was a major supporter of the prisoner aid organization ‘Red Assistance‘, which Götz co-founded. Joseph Götz was arrested on March 20, 1933, already mistreated during police interrogations, and taken to Dachau Concentration Camp five days later. There he was subjected to the most horrific torture in a solitary cell in the camp prison, similar to Fritz Dressel and Hans Beimler, both also members of the KPD. Immediately after Beimler’s successful escape, Joseph Götz was murdered by a shot to the head in the corridor of the camp prison on May 9, 1933.