Fritz Pröll

[1] The 19-year-old metalworker Fritz Pröll joined Augsburg's biggest resistance group in 1934, the Red Help (Rote Hilfe).

From 29 August 1935 he found himself serving a three-year sentence at Landsberg Prison in "protective custody" for "conspiracy to commit high treason".

While the resistance managed to keep his brother back in Buchenwald, Fritz was shifted on 1 November 1944 to the notorious Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen in the Harz.

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 Europe in drudgery to produce Hitler's "wonder weapons", the V1 and V2.

There, Pröll also met the resistance fighters Albert Kuntz, Georg Thomas, Ludwig Szymczak, Otto Runki, Christian Behan, Heinz Schneider, the social democrat August Kroneberg, the Czechoslovakian doctor and Communist Dr. Jan Čespiva, the Soviet flight lieutenant Yelovoy from Odessa who was at Dora under the false name Simeon Grinko, and also Polish, French, and Dutch resistance fighters.

When on 18 November 1944 the Wehrmacht sent two whole trainloads of rockets back marked "Unusable – Sabotage", the fascist terror struck hard.