Richard Aßmann (works council chairman)
Richard Aßmann (16 December 1875 – 21 June 1933) became a Works Council Chairman ("Betriebsratsvorsitzender") with the AOK (national Health Insurance provider) in Berlin. He also involved himself in politics and was a member of the centre-left Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). On 20 June 1933 he was forcibly removed from a tram by Nazi paramilitaries and taken away. His body was found, badly degraded, in a sack in the Dahme (river) on 11 July 1933. His daughter, Hilde Aßmann, was required to identify the body, which she was able to do because she recognised his wrist watch. Although the precise date of his death was never established, Richard Aßmann is generally seen as the first of an estimated 500 victims – at least 23 of whom were murdered while in detention and subsequently identified – of Köpenick's week of bloodshed ("die Köpenicker Blutwoche"), one of the first recorded mass-atrocities carried out by the Nazis after they took power in January 1933. Life 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"). Subsequently, they elected him to the chairmanship of it. At the start of 1933 the Nazis took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Directly after the Reichstag fire, at the end of February 1933, arrests began of people who had been active in the Communist Party before 1933. Throughout the twelve Nazi years, official persecution would be focused most intensely on citizens identified as "Communists" and / or "Jews". But citizens with records of political activism in other parties were also at heightened risk. 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. Köpenick was believed by the new government (and others) to contain particularly large numbers of Communists and Jews. Richard Aßmann had always been particularly trenchant in his criticism of Adolf Hitler and was a known "anti-fascist". He was a local leader in the pro-democracy Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold organisation. 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. According to one source he was taken to the Seidler Restaurant in the Mahlsdorfer Straße which served as an informal center for the SA.He was badly tortured. He may then have been one of a number of detainees taken that night to the prison of the district court which had been taken over by the SA for use as a temporary headquarters. According to another source he was taken to the "SA" building on the north shore of the Müggelsee where he was tortured and murdered. Much of the detail of how Aßmann was tortured and killed remains unclear. At a trial held seventeen years later, the court was