Fritz Lagemann

Fritz (Friedrich) Heinrich Lagemann, who later became a miner, was born in 1877 in Billmerich (then the district of Hamm) in Westphalia. As early as 1918, he was involved in the establishment of democracy. With an SPD mandate, he first belonged to the municipal council of Lintfort, later to the district council.
He lost his first wife and one of his children at an early age.

Having acquired pneumoconiosis at work, he came to Bad Soden for a cure in 1926, where he met Margarete Hißnauer,
a good 20 years his junior, whom he married in December of that year. The Lagemann couple moved into the attic of the “Villa Johannisberg” at Königsteinerstr. 61 (today 99), which belonged to Margarete’s parents. From 1928 to 1931, Fritz Lagemann is listed in the Frankfurt Address Book under the address Königsteinerstr. 69.

In Bad Soden, too, he soon became politically involved in the municipal council. After the SPD was banned by the Nazis in 1933, the time of persecution began. From June onwards, Fritz Lagemann had to report daily to the police. In October 1935 he was arrested by the Gestapo together with Johann Malinowski and three other members of a regional resistance group founded by SPD members.

Fritz Lagemann was one of 204 resistance fighters in Hesse, as his son Herbert, who was born in 1942 (in his second marriage), reported at the Stolperstein laying ceremony in October 2018. Everything had come together “under the table” with him as the “head of the movement”. Lagemann, Malinowski and three other comrades from Soden lost a black folder with 62 names of fellow fighters. It was found by a Nazi informer and passed on to a Nazi bigwig in the spa town. Herbert Lagemann knows that Bad Soden was “very brown”, a Nazi stronghold, at that time.

In October 1935, the Gestapo arrested all five men. Their trial took place before the Higher Regional Court in Kassel. Fritz Lagemann was sentenced to one year and eight months in prison, which he spent in Frankfurt-Preungesheim prison. In prison he was humiliated, maltreated and tortured. The scars remained visible, but his opponents could not break him. After his release he returned to Bad Soden and even there he did not let further harassment dissuade him from his convictions.

After the war, he worked on the reconstruction of democracy in the municipal council of Bad Soden.