On this date in 1923, a German paramilitary was shot by a French firing squad near Dusseldorf for his anti-occupation sabotage efforts. Albert Leo Schlageter, a World War I veteran and conservative Catholic who signed up with the right-wing Freikorps and tangled with communists after the war, joined the fledging Nazi party when it absorbed his Freikorps unit in 1922. The next year, France occupied the Ruhr to secure war reparations payments then crippling Germany, which would do much to speed the rise of the Nazis in the years ahead. Schlageter was nabbed sabotaging railroad lines in resistance, and Berlin’s...
