Gustav Budnick lived with his wife Wilhelmine (née Pferdekämper, born 7.8.1905) and the three children Günter Friedrich (born 4.3.1929), Gerhard (born 11.7.1930) and Edeltraut (born 6.7.1933) at Bergstrasse 118 in Dortmund-Lindenhorst.

Gustav Budnick worked from 1925 to 1931 as a miner at Minister Stein mine, but then became unemployed. Together with mineworkers → Erich  and → Karl Mörchel  (both of whom have their own Stolperstein), he was among the leading organizers of the resistance movement at coalmines and other factories and firms in Dortmund.
On 25 March 1933, he was arrested and held in custody for two weeks on account of his membership of the KPD (Communist Party) and his activities in opposition to the regime, and subsequently lived illegally in Berlin. In August 1935 he was charged with “acts in preparation of treason” and sentenced to imprisonment for a term of one year and two months, at the end of which he continued to be held in “preventive detention” in Dortmund police jail, and was sent from there to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After his release in 1938, he went back to work at Minister Stein mine.
On 9 February 1945, he and 27 other women from the resistance movement were arrested and tortured. They were all murdered by the Gestapo – in the course of the “crimes of the end phase” of the Nazi regime – around Eastertime 1945, by being shot in the back of the head, and were found dead in Rombergpark on 19 April 1945. Altogether, in March and April 1945, some 300 people, in particular slave labourers and members of the resistance, were killed by the Gestapo in Dortmund. They are commemorated today by the monument at Bittermark.