Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
Marie and Josef Spata
Marie Spata, née Schurack
Born: 03.08.1883
Died: 09.06.1944
Josef Spata
Born: 19.01.1888
Died: 10.04.1959
Installation location:
Elisenstraße 23Stumbling stone laying on:
17 May 2022
Life path
According to official statistics, 16,560 death sentences were handed down by civilian courts in the Nazi state, of which around 12,000 were carried out. One of the 15,896 death sentences handed down during the war years concerned the Chemnitz communist Marie Spata, who was executed in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison on 9 June 1944.
Marie Spata was born in Nimschütz near Bautzen. The printing worker was married to the manual labourer Max Gerhardt. The couple lived at Elisenstraße 23. After the marriage ended in 1922, she took her maiden name again. On 3 November 1923, she married the construction worker Josef Spata, who came from the Silesian district of Glatz. Her address did not change even after the remarriage. Josef Spata fought in the First World War and lived in Chemnitz from 1921. He had already found his way to the "Bolshevik Party" while in Russian captivity, as he later wrote. He joined the municipal branch of the KPD in Chemnitz.
After the party was temporarily banned in Germany on 23 November 1923, the couple continued their party activities regardless and organised an illegal meeting. They were arrested on 21 December 1923, but released after 14 days. The couple did not give up their communist ideals even after the "Nazi overthrow" and were arrested again. Josef Spata was then conscripted to Borna near Leipzig by the Nazi authorities. The couple continued their resistance against the Hitler regime together with some of their comrades in arms. Thanks to his language skills, Josef Spata was able to listen in on several enemy stations (including Radio Moscow). In this way, the couple contributed to providing information about the actual course of the war. In September 1943, they were anonymously denounced to the Secret State Police and arrested. It was a plot by several garden neighbours, which was primarily directed against the wife. Josef Spata was released after three weeks in custody. The radio sets ("Saba" and "Körting") were confiscated.
Marie Spata, on the other hand, was transferred to the women's prison in Berlin. The 3rd Senate of the People's Court sentenced her to death on 18 April 1944 for subversion of military power. Her public defender had immediately submitted a petition for clemency, but without success. Immediately before she went to her execution, Marie Spata wrote a "final greeting" to her husband in which she once again proclaimed her innocence. She would now "go to a better world", which was still to come for him. After the end of the war, Josef Spata was the city's commissioner for Russian neighbourhood affairs and then head of the Department for Occupation Affairs in the Social Welfare Department of the City Council.
Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
It is a project against forgetting: stumbling stones have been laid in Chemnitz every year since 2007.
Embedded in the pavement, the memorial stones commemorate the tragic fates of fellow citizens who were persecuted, deported, murdered or driven to their deaths during the National Socialist regime.
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