Werner Seelenbinder

Seelenbinder won the light heavyweight class of Greco-Roman wrestling at the 1925 Workers' Olympiad in Frankfurt.

In 1928 and 1929 he won the Spartakiad in Moscow; over 200 German sportsmen were banned from the contest, but Seelenbinder, with his interest in Marxism, took part.

In 1933 he refused to give the Nazi salute when receiving his medal at the German Wrestling Championship,[1] and was punished with a sixteen-month ban on training and sports events.

Seelenbinder's illegal activities as a courier and his participation in the Uhrig Group had caught their attention: he was arrested, along with 65 other members of the group, on 4 February 1942 and after being tortured for eight days, and enduring nine camps and prisons for two and half years, he was sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof, he was executed for treason on 24 October 1944 at Brandenburg-Görden Prison – he was beheaded with an axe.

At the same time, the stadium itself was named "Werner-Seelenbinder-Kampfbahn", but as the Cold War escalated and the political climate in West Germany became increasingly anti-communist, it was renamed "Stadion Neukölln" in 1949.

In an article in the socialist German newspaper Neues Deutschland of 2 August 2004, the director of the Berlin Sports Museum Martina Behrendt said that his role in the resistance movement had been exaggerated in the GDR, and that there were no reliable biographies.

In 1950, an indoor sporting arena named after Seelenbinder, the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle, was opened in the Prenzlauer Berg district, then in East Berlin.

It was also used as a concert arena, where musicians such as Depeche Mode, Jonathan Richman and The Wedding Present, as well as German acts, such as Feeling B and Rio Reiser, performed.