Posted on 01/26/2013 6:50:10 PM PST by DogByte6RER
August Landmesser (born May 24, 1910; missing and presumed dead Oct 17, 1944; declared dead in 1949) was a worker at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, best known for his appearance in a photograph refusing to perform the Nazi salute at the launch of the naval training vessel Horst Wessel on 13 June 1936.
August Landmesser was the only child of August Franz Landmesser and Wilhelmine Magdalene (née Schmidtpott). He joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1931 in hope of getting a job. When he became engaged to the Jewish woman Irma Eckler in 1935, he was expelled from the party. They registered to be married in Hamburg, but the Nuremberg Laws enacted a month later prevented it.
On October 29, 1935, their first daughter Ingrid was born. In 1937, they tried to flee to Denmark but Landmesser was arrested and it became known that Irma Eckler was pregnant and expecting another daughter.
Landmesser was charged and found guilty of "dishonoring the race" under Nazi racial laws in July 1937. Landmesser argued that neither he nor Eckler knew that she was fully Jewish, and he was acquitted on May 27, 1938 for lack of evidence, with the warning that a repeat offense would result in a multi-year prison sentence. Landmesser and Eckler publicly continued their relationship, and on July 15, 1938 he was arrested again and sentenced to two and a half years in the concentration camp Börgermoor.
Eckler was detained by the Gestapo and held at the prison Fuhlsbüttel, where she gave birth to a second daughter Irene. From there she was sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp, then the Lichtenburg concentration camp for women, and then the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Their children were initially taken to the city orphanage. Ingrid was later allowed to live with her maternal grandmother; Irene went to the home of foster parents in 1941. After her grandmother's death in 1953, Ingrid was also placed with foster parents. A few letters came from Irma Eckler until January 1942. It is believed that she was brought to the so-called Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in February 1942, where she was among the 14,000 killed; she was pronounced dead in 1949, with a date of April 28, 1942.
Landmesser was discharged from prison on 19 January 1941. Landmesser worked as a foreman for the firm Püst, a haulage company. The company had a branch at the Heinkel-Werke (factory) in Warnemünde. In February 1944 he was drafted into a penal battalion, the 999th Fort Infantry Battalion. He was declared missing in action and presumably killed during fighting in Croatia on October 17, 1944. He was declared dead in 1949, with an effective date of August 1 that year. The marriage of August Landmesser and Irma Eckler was recognized retroactively by the Senate of Hamburg in the summer of 1951, and in the autumn of that year Ingrid assumed the surname Landmesser. Irene continued to use the surname Eckler.
- Wikipedia
They clanked when he walked.
Yup.
A fair number of people seem to be looking at the camera out of the corner of their eye.
Today’s liberals would label him as an extremist.
And soon dead, to no meaningful end.
I can see a number of others...that don’t seem to be saluting...Hitler. Maybe not a deviant as August...but nevertheless not saluting.
Should have read...."Maybe not AS DEFIANT as August........"
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another one of those who resisted despite torture and eventual death. I guarantee that he fared better than Hitler in the long run.
Hildegarde Braun nee Rodham, first from the left.
“And soon dead, to no meaningful end.”
It is 76 years later, his bones are now dust, and here YOU are reading all about the life and looking at the photo of a man whom you never knew. You evidently read something here that compelled you to share your thoughts with the world.
I think you just called your own comment meaningless. :-)
Deviant just means deviating from the norm, usually thought of as sexually deviant though. The guy definitely deviated from the norm.
At least he didn’t go to his grave hating himself.
Priests from Dachau worked in the "Plantation" and in the enormous S.S. industrial complex immediately to the west of the camp. In February 1942, two groups of younger Polish priests and scholastics were chosen for work as carpenters' apprentices, but they had actually been chosen (at the express order of Heinrich Himmler) to be injected with pus to study gangrene or to have their body temperature lowered to 27 degrees Centigrade in order to study resuscitation of German fliers downed in the North Atlantic. The Rev. Andreas Reiser, a German, was crowned with barbed wire and a group of Jewish prisoners was forced to hail him as their king, and the Rev. Stanislaus Bednarski, a Pole, was hanged on a cross.
Priests from Dachau worked in the "Plantation" and in the enormous S.S. industrial complex immediately to the west of the camp. In February 1942, two groups of younger Polish priests and scholastics were chosen for work as carpenters' apprentices, but they had actually been chosen (at the express order of Heinrich Himmler) to be injected with pus to study gangrene or to have their body temperature lowered to 27 degrees Centigrade in order to study resuscitation of German fliers downed in the North Atlantic. The Rev. Andreas Reiser, a German, was crowned with barbed wire and a group of Jewish prisoners was forced to hail him as their king, and the Rev. Stanislaus Bednarski, a Pole, was hanged on a cross.
Somehow this reminded me of Daniel, Schadrach, Mesach, and Abendnego(sp?) refusing to bow.
I have that picture as my wallpaper for my computer.
look no further for balls of steel
will you be ready? will you have the fortitude?
he was not the first. nor will he be the last. socialism leads to pure evil, every time.
Great post right there.
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is available on Netflix streaming.
Effing brilliant. Thanks.
Indeed - a man whose death cemented obedience to Hitler. “Ya hear what happened to August? They f-ing killed him just because he didn’t salute! I don’t like this stuff any more than he did, but I dont wanna wonder whether I will return alive each day when I have to say good-bye to my family.”
Suicide rates (which were generally low among Germans), did spike after the War, but mostly among women who had been repeatedly gang raped by the Red Army, many of whom were pregnant and could not accept the idea of an abortion. That is what Germans really mean when they say that they did not understand what Hitler was doing.
Suicide rates (which were generally low among Germans), did spike after the War, but mostly among women who had been repeatedly gang raped by the Red Army, many of whom were pregnant and could not accept the idea of an abortion. That is what Germans really mean when they say that they did not understand what Hitler was doing.
Very provocative and interesting post. Thank you. If this were Facebook I would definitely “like” it ;)
Joe Wilson should be remembered thusly. By ALL of us.
My grandfather went into that fight as an agnostic but returned from Europe as a solid Christian.
“And soon dead, to no meaningful end.”
His life has already served a more meaningingful end than your cowardly life ever could.
Dude, what's up with the quavering, under the table, in the fetal position??!?
Not only would I follow in his footsteps, I might even take out (read: Murder with whatever implement was handy) a Nazi functionary or two.
I mean, you can't be THIS pussified, already, can you??!?
It’s your “I might” that I’m advocating, and the pussification that I’m condemning.
A whole lotta y’all are seriously missing the point.
Oh okay. MUCH better. Never ‘read’ you as a pussbunny. :)
I think maybe I understand how you view this, but correct me if I’m wrong. You see this incident from a practical approach, using the old adage of “Better to live and fight another day.” I would bet you are among the many who view the Alamo defenders as more foolhardy than brave. It’s a different way of seeing things, that’s all.
So which philosophical approach is better? Who’s to say? August Landmesser may very well have lived a long, full life had he resisted ‘under the radar’ instead of open defiance of a totalitarian regime. Conversely, he ALSO could have faded into obscurity despite his very public stand of refusing to salute Hitler in front of the camera’s lens.
As it turned out, here we are in 2013 sitting at keyboards discussing Landmesser’s lone defiance, applying his ordeal to modern times and our current totalitarian-wanna-be pResident. At least one person here was inspired enough by August’s action to put the guy on his desktop. (As will I.) I just hope Landmesser and other brave souls of history — or needless martyrs as you may see them — will be rewarded in eternity by knowing their impact.
Now, if I’m wrong about all this, then I’m going with Laz and his apt description of female body parts. I also don’t want you in my foxhole on the proverbial teoteawki day. ;-)
“Lots of commentary from people who did nothing because they didn’t want to be noticed.”
Ironic how in the end, the spotlight of the world was on the German people for their lack of action in Hitler’s rise and subsequent actions.
Good people doing nothing is the same as consent.
“Better to live and fight another day.”
Indeed.
As long as you do fight.
Plenty of Germans didn’t buy the story about the Reichstag fire but nobody spoke up because they weren’t communists. In fact, questioning the story was enough to be labeled a communist sympathizer and rounded up in the resulting mass arrests.
Well, do us all a favor... If you ever find yourself in a foxhole and decide it’s time to leave so you can live to fight another day, do your foxhole mate a favor: Let him know BEFORE you leave so he can make an informed decision.
There’s nothing worse than dying a needless, naive martyr’s death trying to defend a ghost in the night who turned out to be wiser than you were at the moment. :)
The real star of the movie was Sophie’s interrogator. You almost felt sorry for him, because he was so trapped into believing that it was the Nazis that were responsible for him being something other than a “small town” pollce man. That is the danger of big government, when they give you what you want, there is always a price.
The time to fight was right before The Enabling Act was passed, once it did, it was the “point of no return”.....we are quickly coming to that “point of no return” in this country as well.
Yeah...I know...but didn’t seem the right context.
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