Willi Jungmittag

Willi Jungmittag was a member of the Berlin workers’ resistance and the Saefkow-Jacob-Baestlein organisation, one of the largest resistance groups opposing the Nazi regime in the years 1942-1945. He was born on 8 April 1908 in Leipzig into a working class family with three other children. His father and mother were active trade unionists and members of the SPD. To improve their chances of employment, they moved with their children to Bremen. Here Willi attended school and trained to be a typesetter. He travelled to Czechoslovakia and Austria as a journeyman apprentice, eventually returning to Bremen where he found work. A grant from the company Kaffee Hag Bremen’s Roselius counsel enabled him to take up a course of study at the famous Bauhaus Dessau school of art and design. He decided to study printing and graphics along with the emerging subject of photography. The teachers at the school were all masters of their subjects and propagated a political way of life. In this period, Willi Jungmittag joined the KPD. Having completed his studies, he moved to Berlin in 1930 to work as a freelance photographer for clients including the workers’ magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. He married Brigitte MacNaghten, an English national, with whom he produced photo-reportages of working life in England and Spain.

From 1933 he tried to set up a photography business in Germany specialising in child portraits. He retrained to become a drafter and worked during the war at Bamag-Meguin in Moabit. In 1944 he met Bernhard Bästlein, who had escaped custody, and took him into hiding in his apartment. Willi Jungmittag was arrested on 5 July 1944, sentenced to death on 7 September and executed in Brandenburg-Görden prison on 20 November 1944. He was survived by his wife Brigitte and two daughters.