A “whiff of decayed corpses” lay over the city. With these words Michael Meisner, the later district administrator and editor of the Main-Post, described the Würzburg during the first peace weeks after the American invasion. Therefore, 75 years ago, the military government issued an order to systematically search for the dead under the ruins. The occupiers wanted to prevent the development of epidemics at all costs.
At the end of May, a so-called death recovery squad was formed. It initially consisted of Nazis who were particularly active in the past. They had to submit to the foremen, former concentration camp prisoners, and, as the chief boss, to the well-known Würzburg communist Konrad Försch.
“Straightforward man without vengeance and malice”
Meisner describes Försch as an “idealist, tall and well-built”, as a “straightforward man who knew neither revenge nor malice”. Försch was 52 years old at the time. The trained master baker came from a working-class family in Würzburg. In the First World War he was seriously injured; In 1920 the former SPD member joined the Communist Party (KPD). Försch had four children with his wife Maria; the family lived on Oberthürstrasse.
Since he could not find a job in his learned profession after the end of the war, he worked temporarily as a traveler, was employed in road construction and finally found employment as a packer in a Würzburg electrical wholesaler.
Försch, meanwhile the best-known Würzburg communist and speaker at many meetings, ran as the KPD’s top candidate in the city council election in December 1929, but did not get into the committee.
When the NSDAP took power in 1933, Försch organized the communist resistance in the city, which led to several arrests, but initially to no convictions. This followed in 1936: several years in prison.
On May 5, 1939 Försch was released ?? not to freedom, however, but to Dachau concentration camp. There, as Guido Hoyer writes in his book “Konrad Försch ?? a forgotten Würzburg Communist”, “the most severe abuse awaited him immediately. He was taken to the punishment block, the so-called bunker, where the prisoners were weakened by deprivation of food rations and darkness, for example were. ”
Transfer to Buchenwald concentration camp
In September 1939 Försch was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where in 1942 he belonged to a “special department” which, according to Hoyer, was a “death squad” with the hardest work in the quarry, withdrawal of food and beatings.
In the meantime, Försch lost three children: in 1941, their daughter Eleonore died in Würzburg at the age of eleven of meningitis; the son Richard died in the Ukraine in October of the same year, the son Max in 1943, also in the east.
On May 16, 1945 Konrad Försch returned to Würzburg. “When you walked through the city back then, it smelled of corpse poison in every nook and cranny and I said to myself that something had to happen,” he wrote looking back.
Danger from crumbling ruins and duds
At the end of May Konrad Försch was appointed head of the newly created death recovery squad. He and his men, for example, hid about 50 dead people in Ferdinandeum 30, in the old grammar school (now Augustinerstraße Police), in the Schmitt furniture store on 14 and in Friedrich-Spee- und Randersackerer Straße. Foci of epidemics also existed in Plattnerstrasse, where around 40 hundredweight of decayed meat was taken from the cellar of a butcher’s shop. Some ruins, in whose buried cellars it was difficult to penetrate, threatened to collapse and duds made the work even more life-threatening. All in all, around 500 dead were recovered.
In the recently published publication of the city archives on the final phase of the Second World War in Würzburg and on the mass grave at the main cemetery (“We saved three thousand men, women and children here to rest”), Hans-Peter Baum writes about the professionalization of corpse recovery that will soon be necessary: ” The constant change in the deployment of former NSDAP party members turned out to be not very productive, so that Konrad Försch himself set about gradually dissolving the compulsory labor columns. ” In addition, according to Baum, Försch “did not want to play the role of a” slave owner “and also did not want to give the former party comrades the same for the same”.
After completing the work, Försch and his command took care of the rubble removal, the collection of building materials that were still usable and the digging of canals. Later he got into the debris clearing business professionally; the Försch & Rieß company existed until the mid-1950s.
Konrad Försch became a member of the city council
Konrad Försch was also a member of the city council created in September 1945, a preliminary form of the city council elected for the first time in May 1946. Although he won one of the three communist city council mandates in May 1946, he did not accept it; in the meantime he had been appointed to be responsible for denazification in Lower Franconia. As such, he took part in numerous arbitration proceedings throughout the administrative region. He pleaded for forgiveness of little Nazis, the so-called fellow travelers. Because: “We must not repay like with like. We have to be better.”
This activity ended in September 1946 and Försch devoted himself entirely to his company and political work for the KPD; in the state elections in December 1946, however, the KPD failed to enter the Bavarian parliament. In the city council election on May 30, 1948, the KPD received 8.7 percent of the vote and three seats; Försch, who had run for fourth place on the list, came away empty-handed again.
Konrad Försch died on July 18, 1964 during an operation in the Medical Mission Hospital of the long-term effects of a heart muscle damage that he suffered during many years in a concentration camp.
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