Posted on 12/16/2021 12:52:27 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1943, pacifist novelist Erich Maria Remarque lost his youngest sister to the Nazi regime — beheaded because her “brother is beyond our reach.”
Actually, Elfriede Scholz was convicted (upon the denunciation of her landlady a few weeks before) by the kangaroo People’s Court for undermining the war effort. (“Wehrkraftzersetzung” — German has a word for everything.)
Like her brother, Elfriede was a staunch opponent of the Nazi government, and in 1943 that could certainly have sufficed to get her a one-way trip to Plotzensee Prison.
But Roland Freisler‘s verdict explicitly referenced (German link) her more famous brother — upon whom the Nazis would have poured out an interwar era’s worth of fury had they been able to get to him in America.
Ihr Bruder ist uns entwischt, aber Sie werden uns nicht entwischen! (Your brother is beyond our reach, but you will not escape us!
Though Erich Maria Remarque and Adolf Hitler had served together at the Third Battle of Ypres, they didn’t quite see eye to eye after the Great War.
Remarque’s immortal anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front was banned and burned by war-glorifying Nazis (they also said Remarque was of Jewish descent, apparently without any factual basis)....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Roland Freisler, the judge of the “People’s Court,” was a former Communist who later became a fanatic Nazi. He was killed in 1945 when an American bomb dropped from a B-17 fell on his court room. The bomb also destroyed a number of his records, saving the lives of some of his would-be victims.
Regards,
When his body was brought to the hospital, a worker there is said the have remarked, “It is God’s verdict.”
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