German Resistance Memorial Center Biographie
Egon Illfeld
Egon Illfeld was born into a Jewish family in Battenberg, Hesse. A typesetter, he joined the KPD and was sentenced in absentia to six months' imprisonment for "preparation for high treason" in August 1934. Egon Illfeld had fled to the Saarland before the trial and afterward continued his emigration to Spain. After the Spanish Civil War began, he fought on the Republican side in the Thälmann Group. In September 1936 he left the group and joined the emigrant organization German Anarcho-Syndicalists (DAS).
He was initially partly responsible for political background checks on German-speaking exiles in Barcelona. This meant he was involved in searching and seizing apartments and accommodation occupied by German National Socialists in Barcelona. The DAS members were under the command of the Committee for Investigations and Internal Security run by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist groups CNT-FAI (National Confederation of Labor and Iberian Anarchist Federation). Egon Illfeld also worked in the CNT's propaganda office. He married a Spanish citizen, Ana Maria Megias Sánchez, which later protected him from deportation.
In June 1937, Egon Illfeld was arrested by the communist-led Republican secret police in Barcelona along with other German anarcho-syndicalists, and held in various prisons until April 1938. After the Spanish Republic collapsed in 1939, he fled to France and was held in Gurs internment camp. He was then drafted into labor in the Limousin and Massif Central regions. From 1944 to the end of the Second World War, he lived in hiding in Bordeaux under the name of Ginés Garcia.
After the war, he moved to Paris and then emigrated to Venezuela with his family in 1948. Egon Illfeld returned to Munich in 1959 and died there in 1985.