Ernst Jennrich

Ernst Jennrich (15 November 1911 – 20 March 1954) was a gardener in East Germany who was executed in 1954 after being found guilty murdering a police officer.

Between 1928 and 1930 he was a member of the Sozialistische Arbeiter-Jugend (Young Socialists) and then, between 1930 and 1933, of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

During the Hitler years, between 1933 and 1945, Jennrich was called up to undertake "emergency work".

One of the more high-profile projects on which he worked as a labourer was the construction of the Mittelland Canal.

Many believed that in 1933 it had been bitter divisions on the political left that had opened the way for the Hitler government to take power.

Within the part of Germany under Soviet military administration most members of the former Communist Party and many members of the SPD lost no time in signing their party membership over to the new SED.

The authorities went out of their way to make this very easy.

In 1935 he served a four-week prison sentence for criticising of the government.

Jennrich had married in 1938, and in July 1945, with a wife and four growing children to support, he launched himself as an independent trader in fruit and vegetables.

In 1940 he was conscripted by the Labour Service to work at the Junkers aircraft factory.

In 1942 he was conscripted into the army and sent to serve on the Russian front.

He was badly injured by a shrapnel explosion and, during 1943, released from the army, following which he returned to work at Junkers till 1944, when he was again drafted into the army.

In April 1945, as the war drew to a close, he managed to desert and was almost at once captured by the American forces moving in on Magdeburg.

He spent six weeks as a prisoner of war.

By the time of his release, the American forces were giving way to Soviet military administrators under the terms of a pre-existing understanding between the leaders of the two superpowers.

With the fall of Hitler in May 1945, party political involvement was no longer expressly outlawed in Germany.

Almost immediately Jennrich re-joined the SPD, though there is no indication that he ever became a party activist.

Within the SED there is no indication that Jennrich ever became a party activist, and more than he had within the SPD between 1945 and 1946.

In a contentious development which was, as matters turned out, confined to the Soviet occupation zone, in April 1946 the SPD was merged with (or, it sometimes appeared, into) the Communist Party of Germany.

The resulting "Socialist Unity Party" ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) was held out by the leadership and their Moscow backers as a vital bulwark against a return to Nazism.

Nevertheless, in 1947 he brought himself to the attention of the authorities by resigning his party membership all together.

Some time later, called upon to explain this - arguably "courageous" - move, he explained it as his reaction to having been told, when attending a meeting with party officials, that he had acquired his fruit and vegetables business only through the [good offices of] the party".

In 1949 he was forced to abandon the project, however, because it was unprofitable.

Meanwhile, in October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone had been relaunched and rebranded as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and, following western rejection in May 1952 of Stalin's proposal for German reunification on Stalin's terms, subjected to an intensified programme of wide-ranging and far-reaching "sovietization".

After losing his business in 1949 Jennrich undertook a succession of short term jobs until 1 June 1953, when he accepted a position as a gardener with a Magdeburg-based Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG / "agricultural/horticultural cooperative").

The crystallising issue for the East German uprising of 1953 involved recent increases in "work quotas", which became a particular issue for workers in large production units.

On 16 June 1953 construction workers in East Berlin started a strike and a march on the headquarters of the East German Trades Union Federation (which was a creature of the government).

Strikes and street demonstrators spread across East Berlin and then, within a day, to other major East German cities, including Magdeburg.

At around 08.00 on 17 June 1953 Ernst Jennrich grabbed his bicycle and left his place of work, heading for the administrative office of the LPG for which he worked, in order to collect a documentary permit for timber clearance.

While Jennrich was cycling across the city, in another part of the town, along the Kastanienstraße, about 200 workers had gathered, calling on passing citizens to join them for a general strike and street demonstration.

They stopped trams and buses in order to encourage fellow workers to interrupt their commute and join the demonstration.

By 09.30 the 200 demonstrators had become 2,000, and the numbers kept on growing.

By the mid-morning, the city was on strike and the strikers were on the march across Magdeburg.

Jennrich was initially bemused, unaware of why there were so many people out on the streets.

He would later tell a court, "I simply had no idea how a strike was meant to look, since I’d never been involved in a strike".

According to at least one source, as he returned from the LPG office with his timber clearance permit, Jennrich had to dismount from his bicycle because it was no longer safe, nor even possible, to cycle through the crowds.

On 20 August 1991 the original court verdict was overturned and Ernst Jennrich was (posthumously) rehabilitated by a decision of the district court (Bezirksgericht) in his home city of Magdeburg.

Ernst Jennrich was born into a working-class family in Wedringen, a village a short distance to the north of Magdeburg along the road towards Braunschweig.

He was the eighth of his parents' nine recorded children.

After his eight years of compulsory schooling he embarked on an apprenticeship as a baker, but then switched to gardening, in which he completed his apprenticeship.