Just three years ago he was a celebrated German wrestling champion, but now Werner Seelenbinder is emaciated, down to 60 kilos. After more than two years in prison and concentration camps, he wrote his last lines in prison in Brandenburg an der Havel.
But the resistance fighter doesn’t give up hope even in the darkest hour.
A little later, Werner Seelenbinder is dead. He is just 40 years old. Murdered with a guillotine because he opposed Nazi terror.
Werner Seelenbinder was born in Stettin in 1904. He grew up in Berlin-Friedrichshain. His mother dies early, he looks after his younger siblings, works as a carpenter, bellhop and house servant.
He finds his passion in the Berolina workers’ sports club in Neukölln. Here he trains wrestling and weightlifting. And he deals with the works of Karl Marx and Lenin.
In 1928 he went to the Spartakiad in Moscow.
Athletes from all over Europe take part in the Soviet Union Sports Festival, which was intended to compete with and complement the Olympic Games. Seelenbinder is the only German to win as a wrestler in the light heavyweight category.
A little later he joined the Communist Party, the KPD. And he became a bitter opponent of the emerging National Socialism. In 1933 – the Nazis have now taken power – Seelenbinder becomes German champion for the first time: at the award ceremony he refuses to give the Hitler salute.
Despite this scandal, Seelenbinder is allowed to continue competing for Germany.
Hitler: “I announce the opening of the Berlin Games as a celebration of the 11th Olympiad of the modern era…”
In 1936 he qualified for the Olympic Games and came fourth. If he won a medal, friends later reported, he had once again decided to refuse the Hitler salute.
That doesn’t happen. Instead, in the following years he helped to build a network of resistance groups in companies, used his travels as an athlete for courier services and as a liaison abroad.
In 1942 the group was exposed. Soulbinder is arrested. In 1944 the notorious People’s Court sentenced him to death.
After the end of Nazi rule, numerous streets, schools and sports facilities, especially in the GDR, were named after him.
The Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle in East Berlin has been a venue for SED party conferences for many years, but also for cycling races, handball games and, in the 1980s, increasingly for concerts: Peter Maffay, Rio Reiser, Depeche Mode.
The hall was demolished in 1992. To this day, the name Werner Seelenbinder stands for an athlete who paid for his courageous resistance with his life.
