Munich Stories Ursprung, Max
Dreimühlenstrasse 28, 80469 München
Very few details about Max Ursprung’s life remain. Not even a photograph exists. What we know comes from community registration cards and the documents of the perpetrators. Max Ursprung was born in Traunstein on 9 September 1886. His parents were master glazier Eduard Ursprung and his wife Marie, née Geitner. He had an older sister, Anna, who was born on 9 April 1884. She later lived in Munich in Valleystraße, where she died in 1976. Max was a plumber by trade.
The documents show that Max Ursprung frequently moved from one flat to another. He lived as a subtenant, sometimes for several weks or a few days only, in Freising, Rosenheim and Berlin, and repeatedly in Munich. Max Ursprung’s last registered place of residence was in the rear building of Dreimühlenstraße 28/II in Munich from 1 November 1932 to 30 April 1933.
Max Ursprung repeatedly came into conflict with the law and was imprisoned in Munich, Straubing and Amberg for “moral offences, begging and possession of weapons”. The nature of these “immoral offences” is evident from entries in the population register, where Max Ursprung is listed as subject to registration for “homosexuality”. Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexuality, existed from 1 January 1872 (implementation of the Reich Criminal Code) until 11 June 1994. The law was made stricter under National Socialism, a tightening up that was maintained in post-war Germany until 1973.
Under the pretext of fighting crime, the National Socialists were quick to crack down on people who were known to have broken the law several times or merely suspected of leading a criminal lifestyle. There were no plans to return these people to society. Instead, they were to be locked up as a precautionary measure and kept in custody despite having served their sentence. The severity of the offence was not decisive; even minor offences could be punished with concentration camp imprisonment. A suspicion or a rumour was often enough to warrant imprisonment.
These prisoners, all of whom had to wear a green triangle, were a mixed group. Among them were murderers and rapists, and particularly pimps, burglars and fraudsters. This group of “professional criminals” also included women who had had an abortion, people who had acted criminally out of necessity and homosexuals with several convictions.
In general, a distinction was made in the concentration camps between protective custody and preventive detention – two terms that seem to trivialize the situation. As of February 1933, the Gestapo began to send people to concentration camps as “protective custody” if the National Socialists saw them as a threat to the “people and the state”, as stated in the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree. This mostly referred to political prisoners, homosexuals, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Prison terms were unlimited and trials non-existent.
Prisoners classified as “criminal” or ” antisocial” due to alleged or actual socially deviant behaviour, on the other hand, fell into the “prisoners in preventive detention” category, which also included numerous imprisoned Sinti and Roma. The criminal investigation department was responsible for imposing preventive detention. It took action against social outcasts or imposed further detention on those who had completed their prison sentence once they were released. November 1933 saw the introduction of the first preventive detention decree against so-called professional criminals, while a standardised nationwide regulation for “police preventive detention” was introduced in December 1937.
The Munich criminal investigation department presumably invoked this regulation and on 13 August 1938 ordered protective custody for Max Ursprung, who was taken to Neudeck prison in Munich. On 14 September 1938, he was transferred to Dachau concentration camp. The camp register records that Prisoner 7062 Ursprung was assigned to Barrack 1 / Room 5. In the files of the various concentration camps he was imprisoned in, he is listed as “V.H.” or “PSV”, the German abbreviations for preventive detention (Vorbeugehaft) and police protective custody (polizeiliche Schutzverwahrung).
Ursprung was in Dachau for a short time only, having been transferred to Flossenbürg on 3 October 1938. From there he was sent to Stutthof near Danzig on 5 July 1942, where he was registered as Prisoner 14913 on 8 July 1942. The transfer list of Flossenbürg concentration camp, where prisoners were categorized by “trade”, sounds like a list of items to be ordered.
Suffering from exhaustion, Max Ursprung died in Stutthof concentration camp on 12 October 1942 (EWK 65, U 385). The Stutthof camp doctor’s diagnosis: a “weak, old man” who died of “cardiac insufficiency and old age”. Max Ursprung was just 56 years old at the time.
Research and text by Stefan Dickas
