Fritz Pröll
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Friedrich Wilhelm Pröll (23 April 1915,
Life
The 19-year-old
On 14 March 1942 came his transfer to
Sometime after 17 December 1943 Fritz Pröll and his brother were brought back to Buchenwald concentration camp. While the resistance managed to keep his brother back in Buchenwald, Fritz was shifted on 1 November 1944 to the notorious
In underground shelters where the water reached the walls, the daylight never came in, and the crashing and dust from constant explosions made life hell, worked tens of thousands from all over
There, Pröll also met the resistance fighters
resistance fighters.Sabotage and terror in the camps
The unarmed, half-starved prisoners managed to thwart Hitler's wonder weapon plan. In one third of the rockets sent off in 1944, the mechanisms failed. Out of all the 10,800 V2 rockets that were deployed, more than half blew up while still aloft. The
Fritz Pröll busied himself during his long detention with medicine, thus enabling him to help save many people's lives at Dora. Now, however, he had to use his knowledge so that there would be no danger of his betraying his fellow fighters under torture. In the end, on 22 November 1944, he killed himself with a poison syringe. Fritz Pröll was only 29 years old; he had spent 9½ of those years locked up in prisons and concentration camps.
Since the war
A school class from the Paul-Klee-Gymnasium in Gersthofen did an Internet project in 2001 on, among other things, the Pröll family's life. They ran into unforeseen difficulties. The mayor refused to allow the students access to the archives. Access could only be gained by court order.
One of the Pröll family has sought to change the street name Wernher von Braun Straße in Gersthofen to Fritz Pröll Straße, but it has not come about yet. The Town of Gersthofen justified its refusal to change the name arguing that there was a longstanding policy of naming streets in any particular part of town thematically. Following this policy, and to redress any oversight, the streets in a new neighbourhood are to be named after resistance fighters.
References
Literature
- Gernot Römer: Für die Vergessenen : KZ-Aussenlager in Schwaben; Schwaben in Konzentrationslagern. - Augsburg : Presse-Dr., 1984
External links
- School project about Fritz Pröll
- School project thwarted at every turn (see above)
- "Anna, ich hab Angst um dich", a film by Josef Pröll, Junior and Wolfgang Kucera about Anna Pröll, Fritz Pröll's sister-in-law,
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