Fritz Heine (; 6 December 1904 – 5 May 2002) was a German politician (SPD). He also involved himself in political journalism and newspaper publishing.
Most of the twelve Nazi years he spent in political exile, based initially in Prague. Shortly after the fall of France and the establishment of a puppet state (Vichy France) in the southern half of the country he established himself in the "Hotel de Berne" in Marseille where, by the time he was himself forced to flee to Portugal in March 1941, it has been estimated that he rescued "at least 600 people" – refugees from Nazi Germany forced to flee for reasons of race and / or politics – by organising identity papers, visas, tickets and cash.
Life
Social democratic childhood Fritz Heine was born in Hanover, his parents' only child. His mother, always delicate, died from Consumption during the First World War when he was just twelve. His father, Friedrich Heine, was an organ builder who had, like his brothers, joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) in its early days. Socialist political ideas were therefore part of Fritz Heine's childhood. Initially he underwent a conventional Protestant upbringing, but when he was thirteen he rejected Protestantism. His father did not try to prevent this, although much later, looking back, Heine suggested that his act of teenage rebellion must have embarrassed his father whose work, as a builder of organs, necessarily involved churches and churchmen. After his mother died his father remarried: his second wife was a distant cousin who had been widowed on 4 August 1914 when her first husband had poisoned himself in order to avoid having to fight in the war that had been launched a week earlier.
Party worker Heine underwent a commercial training and worked between 1923 and 1925 as a sales representative and / or marketing assistant for a printing machine manufacturer. He had already, when aged just 18, joined the SPD in 1922, and in 1925 he volunteered to work in Berlin, an hour by train to the east of Hanover, for the party national executive. By this time he had moved on from his work selling printing machines and was supporting himself as a journalist for a Hanover regional sports-newspaper. After six months as a volunteer trainee with the party he was given a job as a joint-secretary, working for the party treasurer. Early on, however, he was transferred to work as an editorial assistant on Vorwärts ("Onwards" / "Forwards"), the party newspaper.
Resisting the Nazis As the political temperature increased during the later 1920s, from 1928 Franz Heine began to create a propaganda and publicity department for the party. Although one or two local party branches were involved informally in this type of activity, there was, prior to 1928, no national department undertaking it. In 1929 he is described as the Technical Head of the Publicity Department ("Technischer Leiter der Werbeabteilung"). Work included monitoring of newspaper coverage, along with producing pamphlets and posters. He was also involved in the early use for party political publicity of sound film. The accelerating growth in support for the populist demagoguery and street violence following the Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression failed to put an end to his political work.
In 1932 Heine was placed on Probation for defamation of a Nazi politician. The political tide continued to flow strongly against moderate politics: in January 1933 the Nazis took power and lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Formally the ban on the SPD was implemented only in June 1933, but by that time the authorities had already been implementing a succession of measures to put an end to political activity – other than on behalf of the Nazi Party. After initially working "underground" against the Nazi regime, in May 1933 the Vorwärts ("Onwards" / "Forwards") production team, including Heine was obliged to flee to Prague, still, for historical reasons, till 1945 a multi-cultural city where German was widely spoken. They travelled armed, and each carrying several hundred Marks of party funds in cash, leaving the safe in the party headquarters empty except for worthless inflation-era bank notes.
Exile in Prague From his Prague basis Heine was active in resistance work as secretary with the Sopade, the exiled SPD leadership group based in the city between 1933 and 1938. Serving between 1933 and 1936, with particular responsibilities in respect of publication and propaganda matters and on co-ordination of party resistance activity within Germany, he organised couriers, who risked their lives using false identities to maintain links between the Sopade leaders in Prague and party supporters still in Germany. Early on he himself also undertook approximately ten missions between Prague and Germany, using a false passport.
Although the methods used to transport party propaganda material from Prague to Germany became ever more sophisticated, and included the use of microfilms hidden in canisters disguised as toothpaste containers, the Gestapo became ever more adept at identifying and intercepting it, and at cutting off funding to the Prague group. In 1936 the propaganda activities of the Sopade operation in Prague had to be suspended. Working conditions became increasingly difficult. German envoys appeared 29 times at the Foreign Ministry in Prague to deliver increasingly menacing protests against the activities of the exiled SPD and the publication, since 1933 from Prague, of the party newspaper Vorwärts. In Summer 1937 the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, felt himself forced to give out an ultimatum: either the Sopade group must put an end to all political and publication activity or they would have to leave Czechoslovakia completely. However, in March 1938 a solution appeared when Léon Blum, who was sympathetic to any left-wing political exiles from Nazi Germany, returned to power as Prime Minister of France and offered the Vorwärts team unconditional. Heine received his French entry visa on 20 April 1938 and arrived two days later in Paris to be greeted with the news that back in Germany he had been stripped of his citizenship. Working conditions in Paris were difficult, both because money was desperately short and because hardly anyone there spoke German, but a small print-shop was procured, with difficulty, on the outskirts of the city, and production of Vorwärts resumed, although it is not clear whether, by now, it was circulated beyond the community of German political exiles in France. Meanwhile, during the summer of 1938 Germany progressively annexed the frontier regions around the western half of Czechoslovakia under an arrangement sanctioned in September 1938 by the governments of France and Britain. In 1939 Fritz Heine was co-opted into the leadership team of the Paris-based exiled SPD.
Exile in Paris War broke out in September 1939 and a couple of weeks later Otto Wels, leader of the exiled Paris based party, died. The situation became ever more confused. At this stage Heine remained a liberty. Nevertheless, by now even in France political refugees were becoming increasingly closely monitored, required to report to the local prefecture each week. The precise intended purpose of this remained vague, but one effect was to ensure that the authorities had up to date records of where they lived. Heine's name was included on a list held at the Interior Ministry of "Known international anti-fascists". In May 1940 German armies invaded France and, more rapidly than almost anyone in Paris had anticipated, overran the northern half of the country. Heine was now, like hundreds of other political refugees from Nazi Germany, interned. After a few days in the internment camp an announcement was made over the tannoy inviting inmates to volunteer for work as unarmed military assistants. Heine volunteered for work that was thought to involve digging trenches. Later he was set to work building huts and walls for a military encampment ten miles or so outside Paris. However, with the German army advancing rapidly and the French army retreating during May and June 1940, military organisation was in short supply as it affected the volunteer military assistants. Heine and others managed to escape after a few weeks and joined the hundreds of thousands streaming south out of Paris in order to get away from the German armies approaching from the north.
Refugee escape organiser in Marseille He settled in Marseille, which was in the so-called Free zone of France, still at least notionally autonomous in 1940, but ruled by the Pétain government which was sympathetic to the Nazi cause as were many, though by no means all, the government officials whom it employed. In Marseille he worked with the journalist Varian Fry, originally from New York City, to organise the Emergency Rescue Committee, which concerned itself with arranging paperwork to facilitate emigration of those at risk from the Nazis. In retrospect the "Emergency Rescue Committee" has come to be celebrated as an organisation for rescuing Jewish persecution victims, and many of those it helped were indeed Jewish, but the defining criterion for those rescued was the extent to which they were at risk from the Nazis. High-profile anti-Nazi journalists and political activists were deemed at great risk even if they were not Jewish, and were helped accordingly. Germans who had been deprived of citizenship – such as Heine himself – were technically stateless and for that reason at particular risk of arrest. It was in any event a matter for the US authorities to determine who should be helped. The French authorities would grudgingly issue exit visas only if applicants were already in possession of entry visas – visitor visas – for the United States, and the Spanish authorities would not permit transit to Portugal (from where refugees, provided their paperwork was in order, might escape by sea) unless they had valid paperwork from both the US and French authorities. Some of the details of Heine's work in Marseille remain unclear. Refugees who had arrived without any passport were issued simply with a green refugee identity document ("titre de voyage"): holders had particular difficulties obtaining further travel documents, and forged documents of varying levels of quality became widely used. One detail which Heine himself later recalled involved a number of "stateless" refugees who were particularly young and fit. Heine was able to work with a former employee of the Lithuanian consulate who had retained the necessary equipment and expertise to produce forged Lithuanian passports, whereby 20 or 30 people were able to cross the Pyrenees on foot and satisfy the authorities that their papers were in order. This arrangement had to be ended after a refugee with a genuine Lithuanian passport was stopped and arrested by Spanish frontier officials because his passport differed significantly from the forged Lithuanian passports to which officials had become accustomed.