Berlin Trip : Topography of Terror Museum (Brave Man, August Landmesser, Not Doing Salute)

I’ve never seen this photo before, but it’s of a brave man who decided that he wouldn’t do the Nazi salute despite everyone around him doing so. The crowd were workers at the Blohm & Voss shipyards during the singing of the national anthem which followed the Fuhrer’s address on 13 June 1936 in Hamburg. There was for some time a dispute about who this person was, but the museum seems pretty certain that it was August Landmesser. Landmesser’s defiance stemmed from his relationship with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman, who he married in 1935 in spite of the Nazi regime’s strict laws against these relationships.

The situation is more interesting though, as Landmesser had joined the Nazi party in 1931, alarmed by the economic situation in the country and perhaps, like many, wanting to enhance his own employment prospects. His relationship with a Jewish woman started in 1933 and he was promptly expelled from the party, with this being at a time when from 1934 it was possible to charge people who failed to perform the Nazi salute. August and Irma tried to flee Germany to reach Denmark in 1937, but they were arrested before they crossed the border and returned back, with the legal case against their marriage being dropped in 1938 due to a lack of evidence. It was effectively a warning to the couple that they should end this relationship, but they weren’t going to do that.

Since the couple stayed together, the lack of evidence didn’t prove a problem though and August was arrested later in 1938 and sentenced to two and a half years in the Börgermoor concentration camp. Irma had two children with August, which led to her being sent to Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, where she died in 1942. August was released from imprisonment in January 1941 and worked as a foreman for a haulage company for a while, before being enlisted. He was killed in action on 17 October 1944 in Croatia and he was buried in a mass grave near Hodilje, located near Dubrovnik. In 1951, their marriage was declared legal following the restoration of some sort of normality in Germany and although they had both died, it must have been some sort of comfort to their two children who had already been put into the care of a guardian. One of the children, Irene, wrote a book about her parents with the title “A Family Torn Apart by Rassenschande: A Document of the Persecution of the Landmesser Family”.

It’s rare that you can really guess at what someone was thinking just by looking at an historic photo, but I imagine that August had just heard a load of anti-Semitic piffle (or at least some hate directed at some group) and was hardly in a mood to cheer on the Nazi leadership. It must have been very difficult to stand alone at this time and Nazi officials often watched over a crowd to look for any dissension. Above is a photo of the same event but with Hitler in the photo.

I have a radical view, although it’s not really radical, but if you have a crowd chanting at the end of a speech (and particularly one which has been directed at some target group) then there might well be a problem ahead….