Richard Aßmann (16 December 1875 – 21 June 1933) became a Works Council Chairman ("Betriebsratsvorsitzender") with the AOK (national Health Insurance provider) in Berlin.

[2][3] Richard Aßmann was a clerical worker employed by the AOK (national Health Insurance provider) in Berlin.

During Germany's inter-war democratic period his fellow workers elected him as an employee representative to the organisation's works council ("Betriebsrat").

His home was on one side of the market place in Friedrichshagen which was at that time administered as part of the Berlin suburb of Köpenick.

On the early morning of 21 June 1933 several Nazi "SA" paramilitaries boarded a tram on which Aßmann was travelling and forcibly removed him from it.

At a trial held seventeen years later, the court was informed that Aßmann was "one of the first to be taken on 21 June 1933 to the SA building along Seestraße [following an intervening change of the street name identified in 1950 as 'Müggelseedamm 132'], where he was abducted and subjected to mistreatment" ("...gehörte zu den ersten, die am 21.6.1933 in das SA-Heim Seestraße, heute Müggelseedamm 132, verschleppt und dort misshandelt wurden").

[3] It was established by the trial in 1950 that one of his murderers was an SA drum major and World War I veteran called Fritz Liebenhagen.

At the time Abusch was a Communist Party activist: he would spend most of the twelve Nazi years as a political exile, first in France and later in Mexico.

After war ended, he was able to return to Berlin in July 1946, becoming a member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) in the Soviet occupation zone: he was for many years after 1949 a stalwart of the East German political establishment.