Stumbling block for Karl Schild

Karl Schild was born in Mannheim on September 22, 1910.
At the age of 15, he became a trade union member of the German Metalworkers' Association as an apprentice mechanic. From 1925 to 1926, he was a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ), the youth organization of the SPD.
In 1927 he joined the Naturfreunde and in 1928 the Freidenkerverband. In 1928, he joined the syndicalist organization Freie Arbeiterunion Deutschland (FAUD), which opposed the policies of the SPD and KPD.

With this organization, Karl Schild joined the resistance against the Nazi regime in 1933. His group's work consisted of distributing leaflets and setting up illegal organizations in Worms, Alzey, Darmstadt, Frankfurt and Offenbach. In April 1933, he was arrested for the first time for four weeks. His second arrest took place in Darmstadt in January 1935. In August 1936, the 2nd Senate of the People's Court sentenced him to four and a half years in prison with loss of honor and subsequent police supervision. He was sent directly from Ludwigsburg prison to the Aschendorfer Moor II prison camp. In February 1943, the Nazis forced him into the German Wehrmacht's "Probationary Battalion 999". Even here, he continued to work in the resistance and had contact with the Greek liberation movement.

Karl Schild was a British prisoner of war in Egypt until December 1946.
In 1947, he came to Offenbach and became secretary of the VVN and later its regional secretary. Social and compensation issues for the victims of fascism were important to him. He was a KPD city councillor in Offenbach and Offenbach district chairman of the VVN-BdA from 1955 until his death. For many years, Karl Schild worked as a journalist for the newspaper "die tat". Many young people got to know him as a contemporary witness in schools, at the trade union or at VVN events. He was able to give vivid accounts of his time during the resistance.

Like his partner Änne Salzmann, Karl Schild was one of the founding members of the VVN Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime.

He died in Offenbach on March 30, 1991 at the age of eighty.

Source: Outline of the future of anti-fascism, Ulrich Schneider, Bonn, 1997