AUGUST STREUFERT 1887 – 1944.
August Karl Hans Streufert was born in 1887 in Negast, a small town near Stralsund, Germany. While going to school in Negast, people in the town realized that he was highly intelligent child and endeavored to collect money to pay for a university education. However the people of the small town could not come up with sufficient funds. Consequently, August, after school graduation, had to learn a trade and became a cabinet maker. Some of the beautiful wooden cabinets he created are now collectors’ items. At the beginning of the First World War I in 1914 he was drafted into the Prussian army and sent to fight at the French front lines. A French bullet pierced his lung and the military physicians did not expect him to survive. He heard their discouraging comment and decided to make every effort to stay alive. He was successful. However, with his lung injury he could no longer breathe sawdust and had to give up his profession as a cabinet maker.
August then worked in State Government (Pommerania) and became the Division-Director of the State Employment Service. He was active in the Social-Democratic Party (Germany) in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was elected to the city council of Stralsund, then to the State Parliament in Pommerania and in 1930 to the German national legislature. In his activities as a legislator (Berlin) he became the author and contributor to several German labor laws.
Poverty and starvation generated by the consequences of the post-World War One Versailles Treaty helped both communist and Nazi parties to gain a considerable followership. Both parties held many political rallies to obtain national power in Germany. Both communist and Nazi leaders would often ask at the end of their rally whether any listeners wished to comment. August Streufert, an excellent speaker himself, would at times step up. He repeatedly got the attending public to laugh about whatever the communists of Nazi speaker had said. As a result, he was not liked by either of those two parties.
Even though the Nazis had received less than a third of the votes in the 1933 German national elections, their party managed to take national power. As soon as they did the Social Democratic Party was outlawed and August was fired from public employment. No German business or government was allowed to employ him. He finally found a job representing the Dutch VanHouten Company in Northern Germany.
He continued to fight the Nazi government as part of an “underground” movement and managed to rescue and save the lives of many people whom the Nazis were trying to capture (Jews, the Handicapped, US and British bomber pilots that had parachuted after their planes were hit by anti-aircraft fire, and several others that the Nazi government considered socially or politically undesirable).
After the 1944 failed attempt at Hitler’s life by military and political leaders in Germany, August Streufert was arrested and placed into a concentration camp. Supposedly he died there in the morning of December 27, 1944 – together with many others of “pneumonia.”
Today his memory is honored in various cities in Germany where he worked and/or where he lived. Monuments have been erected and streets have been named for him (e.g., at the “Reichstag” in Berlin, in Stralsund and in Schwentinental (formerly Raisdorf).