Heinrich Hartmann was born in Mutterstadt on 12 September 1885. A trained printer, he worked as an editor for the SPD newspaper Pfälzische Post until it was banned in March 1933. He was twice taken into “protective custody” in Ludwigshafen in 1933. From 1934 he lived at Lindenstraße 1, where he and his wife Franziska Ledig ran her father’s inn, “Zur Linde”. The inn became an important meeting place for Social Democrats, whose party had been banned by the Nazis. After the war, Hartmann helped re-establish the SPD in Mutterstadt and became its first chairman in 1946. That same year he was elected mayor. Until 1949 he led the community through reconstruction, housing shortages, supply problems and the challenges of occupation and postwar return.
