Josef “Bebo” Wager (29.12.1905 Augsburg – 12.8.1943 Munich-Stadelheim prison)

Growing up in a working-class family in Augsburg, Josef Wager became involved in the Socialist Workers’ Youth and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from an early age. He worked as an electrical engineer for MAN from the 1930s onwards. He and his wife Lina had three children.

Together with fellow youths such as the typesetter Eugen Nerdinger, Wager had no intention of standing idly by and watching the decline of the Augsburg SPD after the Nazis came to power. Contrary to the line taken by the executive of his party in exile in Prague, whose strategy was ‘work by the masses’ – e.g. the distribution subversive publications – with the aim of overthrowing the Nazi system in the near future, the Augsburg Revolutionary Socialists pursued a different goal: they sought to collect and disseminate mood reports from Augsburg factories, establish small and rigorously conspiratorial groups, and engage in intense training to prepare for the anticipated crisis resulting from war and subsequent defeat. The idea was to seize the ‘revolutionary moment’ to establish a democratic-socialist order.

The group found a supporter from 1936 onwards in the economist Hermann Frieb in Munich, and they were actively involved in setting up additional groupings in southern Bavaria and Austria which comprised a total of around 200 people by 1942. When the war started, Wager and his friends saw a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’ approaching, so they set about stockpiling weapons and preparing sabotage operations in armaments factories. After Frieb and Nerdinger were drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941, Bebo Wager, the head of the organization in southern Bavaria, was a key figure to the fact that he worked for MAN – the largest armaments factory in Augsburg.

The group had already come to the attention of the Gestapo, however. After some members were detained in Austria, Bebo Wager was arrested at his workplace on April 16, 1942. After more than a year of investigation and torturous interrogation, Wager and Frieb were sentenced to death by the People’s Court in Innsbruck on May 27, 1943, with two other defendants each being sentenced to twelve years in prison. In subsequent trials a further eight death sentences and prolonged prison sentences were passed against members of the Revolutionary Socialists. Wager and Frieb were executed in Stadelheim Prison on August 12, 1943.

In recognition of his almost ten years of resistance activity, a street, a school and a social institution were named after Bebo Wager in Augsburg.