When he was 17 and stood 1.92 meters (6.3 ft), he joined a boxing club and trained at home, causing the furniture to shake when he jumped rope inside.

[4] In art school, he preferred to create wood engravings, but after finishing, Kiwitz began working more with woodcuts, which entailed a process more suited to his temperament.

[7] In early 1933, after the Nazis seized power, Kiwitz' studio was ransacked by the Sturmabteilung (SA) and he left Berlin, returning to his parents' home.

[1] Shortly after, in summer 1933, he also was arrested and thrown in Kemna concentration camp[1] for "antifascist activity" and having produced "work critical of society".

After his release in June 1934, he sought to protect himself from further arrest by destroying the majority of his political artwork and confining his illustrations to literary themes.

[note 1] The group organized an exhibit called "Five Years of Hitler Dictatorship", (Fünf Jahre Hitler-Diktatur) held at a local union hall.

[7] Letters to his parents during this time do not mention his political activities, but a request for a sum of money (10 Reichsmark) indicates his financial status was precarious.

For I myself deliberately and always have repudiated the un-German destruction of art, which chases and hunts the true artist abroad, declares every house painter a genius if only he has had the Party membership in his pocket long enough and kowtows before the dictator.

It is precisely this adulteration from above from which the authentic, great German art arose as protest, from Riemenschneider to Schiller's Don Carlos to Lehmbruck and Barlach.

My populism makes me belong with Nolde and Barlach, against whom the Schwarze Korps is leading a brutal campaign, whose works they remove from galleries and whose exhibitions were closed by the Gestapo because they unswervingly carry on the tradition in the path of Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald.

At the cradle of German art stood a sculptor, Tilmann Riemenschneider, who, because his heart beat with the hunted, rebelling peasants, was so harmed in torture by the rich tyrants, that by the end of his life, he could no longer wield a chisel.

Guernica, concentration camps and war against religion – what can German art create with this dance of death of human culture, other than to swing the scourge against this forced march into barbarism?

Called "Heinz Kiwitz : Holzschnitte, Linolschnitte und Zeichnungen", the exhibit started in Lüdenscheid, then moved to Telgte, then to the Städtisches Museum in Gelsenkirchen and then finished at the Galerie im Theater in Gütersloh.

In 2010, in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Brennender Dornbusch Foundation organized an exhibit of Kiwitz' work at the Liebfrauenkirche in Duisburg.