Franz Stenzer (9.6.1900 Planegg near Munich – 22.8.1933 Dachau Concentration Camp)

Franz Stenzer came to live in Munich in 1917. Drafted into the navy in 1918, he returned at the beginning of 1919. During the period of the soviet republic he spent a brief period in the workers’ militia at the railway depot, where he had found work, before settling in Pasing. As a machine cabin assistant and coal loader with the German Rail Company, he soon became involved in helping his colleagues’ with their social problems, joining the railway workers’ trade union and being elected to the works council on several occasions. He joined the Pasing group of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919 and became highly politically active in the trade union and works sector: this resulted in him becoming leader of the southern Bavarian KPD from the mid-1920s onwards. From fall 1928 to spring 1929 he attended the Lenin School in Moscow before returning to Munich to devote himself entirely to political work, being elected to Pasing Municipal Council at the end of 1929 and to the Reichstag in 1932. In the same year he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Stenzer opted not to emigrate after the Nazis came to power, in spite of the enormous risk this involved, but instead took on coordination of the underground work done by the KPD in Bavaria. Initially unable to capture Stenzer himself, the Nazis took his wife Emma (1897-1998) ‘hostage’ on April 19, 1933, even though the couple had three small children. The police finally arrested Stenzer at Roecklplatz in Munich on May 30: they took him to Dachau Concentration Camp the next day, where he was brutally abused in the camp prison as a ‘well-known’ Nazi opponent. On August 22 he was taken out of his cell by SS men and murdered. A report in the Nazi press claiming that Stenzer had been shot while attempting to escape was clearly refuted by the subsequent public prosecutor’s investigation. Stenzer was shot in the back of the head at close range.

Franz Stenzer’s brother Rupert was also imprisoned at Dachau Concentration Camp from the end of June 1933 to April 1935. When Emma Stenzer was granted three weeks’ parole for her husband’s funeral, she took the opportunity to flee with her children, supported by ‘Red Assistance’ – first to Saarland, then to Paris and finally to exile in Moscow in 1934. She returned to Germany in 1945 and lived in East Berlin.