Hamburg Stories August Hein and Adolph Kummernuss
Besenbinderhof 62, 20097 Hamburg- St. Georg
Persecuted as trade unionists and social democrats
“This house will be our intellectual arsenal.” With these words, social democrat August Bebel opened Hamburg’s trade union building in 1906. It was raided in 1933 by the SA, the SS and members of the NSDAP. Union board members were arrested, including the trade unionists and social democrats August Hein and Adolph Kummernuss. Undaunted, Adolph Kummernuss set up an underground organization in the North German ports. August Hein also joined the Resistance.
AUGUST HEIN was born in Würzburg in 1888, the son of a bricklayer. After attending primary school, he trained as a bookbinder and left home for Hamburg. From 1920 to 1923 he was employed in the management of the German Association of Bookbinders in Hamburg. He then joined the administration of the General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) and and managed the business of the 11th district (Nordmark) of the ADGB as district manager. August Hein was a social democrat and as such was a member of the Hamburg parliament from 1930 to 1933.
Once the national socialists had occupied the trade union buildings, Hein was arrested on 2 May 1933 and immediately fired. After his release he joined the Resistance and was later part of the social democrat / trade union resistance network that operated German wide and was organized by Wilhelm Leuschner in Berlin.
August Hein died of tuberculosis on 8 February 1944 in Aschaffenburg at the age of fifty-six.
ADOLPH KUMMERNUSS was born 23 June 1895 in Hamburg, the son of a blacksmith and one of twelve children. His father worked in the Hamburg dockyards, his mother was a nurse. After winning money in the Lotto, the family was able to buy a bakery, where Adolph and his twin brother Georg contributed to the family income at a very young age as “bread roll boys”.
Adolph, known to everyone as “Adje”, joined the socialist workers movement at the age of fourteen. When he left primary school, he initially scraped through as a “sleeper”. A sleeper rented a bed at a very low price for a few hours daily when the flat was not being used by the people who lived there. For the rest of the time he worked as a docker in Hamburg port. Dockers at that time were responsible for loading and unloading sacks, boxes and barrels on and off cargo ships. At the age of seventeen he joined the Association of German Transport Workers and became a member of the SPD (German social democratic party).
He fought in Russia in the First World War as an infantry soldier on the eastern front, was badly injured twice and returned home after the war a staunch pacifist. The young dockworker became a road sweeper in Hamburg- Eilbek until 1920, when he began to work again as a docker on the Hamburg saltpetre quay. He also worked as a cotton cooper (the main task of a cooper was to check the quality of goods arriving by ship and store them appropriately in sheds). During this time he also took courses at the adult education centre in Hamburg.
Adolph Kummernuss finally begann his “social democratic career” during the Weimar Republic: Following various port jobs and the introduction of the Works Council Act, he was elected to the Works Council, was an adviser to the SPD, underwent training at the Frankfurt Academy of Labour, became a full-time “agitation leader” in the port of Hamburg, and took over the “legal information office” there.
After the liquidation of the trade unions, which he witnessed on 2 May 1933 (as did August Hein) in the Hamburg trade union building, Kummernuss set up an illegal organization in the North German ports. It was betrayed by an informer and finally crushed by the Gestapo.
Despite his mistreatment in the Gestapo headquarters, Adolph Kummernuss never revealed the names of the other members of the organization. After several prison terms, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment in Stettin and remained under police supervision until the end of the war. After the war, Kummernuss became head of the ÖTV (Public Services, Transport and Traffic Union) and the DGB (German Trade Union Confederation) and held various positions in the SPD.
Adolph Kummernuss died in August 1979 in Travemünde at the age of eighty-four.
