Die weisse Rose, NRD verkuerzt

1982:  TOLL!  Sophia und Hans Scholl und ihre Gruppe . . .

HIER IST DER LINK

Die weisse Rose: Hans und Sophie Scholl

hinrichten:  executed

Links to films:


Weisse Rose 1982 film:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2pRjSR0HJ7fbUFFVDlKdHRtZ3M/edit?pli=1

Another new version of Die Weisse Rose from German TV. (45 minutes)
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/2022846/Sophie-Scholl-Die-Seele
-des-Widerstands#/beitrag/video/2022846/Sophie-Scholl-Die-Seele-des-Widersta
nds

Keine Werbespot fuer Mercedes-Benz

Wo?  In Braunau an dem Imm, in Ober-Oesterreich ...
Wann?   Etwa 1896.




Vorsicht!

Was this appropriate?
Effective?

1891 wurde AH in Imm, Oesterreich geboren.

Ferdinand Porsche's People's Car: VW "Beetle" (der Käfer)

Designing Cars for Hitler: Porsche and Volkswagen's Nazi Roots

From the Magazine

 By Dietmar Hawranek      21 July 2009

Both Volkswagen and Porsche had close connections with the Third Reich. It was Ferdinand Porsche who designed the "people's car," the legendary VW Beetle, in 1934. Adolf Hitler was so taken with the engineer he declared him "brilliant."

Without Ferdinand Porsche, neither automotive giant Volkswagen nor luxury marque Porsche would exist today. The man who would have a huge influence on German car-making was born in Bohemia in 1875 and completed his apprenticeship in his father's mechanical shop.
 

 While working for the Viennese coach-building firm Lohner, which produced coaches for the court of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria, Porsche developed an engine that many engineers are once again working on today: the electric motor. A vehicle equipped with the motor was an attraction at the Paris World's Fair in 1900. 

Even at a young age, Porsche enjoyed such a strong reputation that two dictators vied for his favor and service: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. But that never seemed to trouble Porsche: He was an inventor and a developer who was interested solely in his designs. In the end, who he worked for was as unimportant to him as the question of whether the projects were of a civilian or military nature. Solving the problem at hand was what mattered to him, not who was paying him.

In World War I, he designed aircraft engines for the army of the Austrian emperor and tractors for heavy artillery. Later on, Porsche developed sports cars for Daimler in Stuttgart, before founding an engineering firm with his son Ferry in Stuttgart, which developed cars for two German car and motorcycle makers, Zündapp and NSU.
In 1932, a delegation from Moscow visited Porsche in his Stuttgart office. Shortly thereafter, Stalin invited him to the Soviet Union for an informational visit. "At first we thought the invitation was so improbable that we had trouble taking it seriously," Ferry Porsche later wrote in his autobiography. "But soon it was made very clear to us that everything was perfectly serious."

Stalin wanted to advance industrial development in the Soviet Union with the help of experts from capitalist countries. He had Porsche taken on tours of aircraft and automobile factories and, in the end, made him an offer to become general director of the development of the Soviet auto industry.  Stalin promised Porsche many privileges and powers. But the German engineer turned down Stalin's offer "after much consideration," Ferry Porsche wrote.
 
'The Brilliant Design Engineer'

It was not the communist dictatorship that had deterred the senior Porsche as much as the language barrier. How could he manage such a gargantuan task, he reasoned, if he couldn't even communicate in his native tongue?

Stalin's offer "could have had a very decisive influence on my subsequent life," Ferry Porsche wrote. His life would not have been the only one affected.

If Porsche had accepted, the VW Beetle might have become the Soviet Union's "people's car." And instead of becoming a symbol of West Germany's post-war "economic miracle," perhaps it would have become an icon of Russian backwardness -- as the Lada did, years later.

When Hitler asked the German automobile industry to develop a "suitable small car" in 1934, Porsche submitted the best design -- and was awarded the contract. At the 1935 German auto show, Hitler was full of praise for Porsche. He said that he was pleased that, thanks to "the abilities of the brilliant design engineer Porsche," it had been possible to "complete the preliminary designs for the German Volkswagen (people's car)."

A new factory had to be built to produce the car, as well as a new town surrounding the factory to house the workers. "Hitler proposed building the factory in central Germany," Ferry Porsche recalled.
The search for the site proceeded from the air. It was to be located near a railway line, canals and autobahn. The site that was eventually chosen was near a medieval castle, the Wolfsburg, after which the city was later named.

Hitler wanted to call the factory the "Porsche Plant," but Ferdinand Porsche was opposed to the idea. Instead, it became the Volkswagen Plant.
 
An Automobile for the Masses
 
Much of the money to build the plant came from trade union assets. To this day, the IG Metall metalworkers' union has a right to an expanded role in the management of the VW Group on the basis of this early use of union money. As a result, VW management cannot move production to a different plant without the consent of labor representatives on its supervisory board.

DER SPIEGEL

 

Keeping it in the family:
The Porsche dynasty.

Berthold Huber, the current head of IG Metall, accused Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking of being "ignorant of history" when Wiedeking planned to acquire Volkswagen and transform the group into what he called a "normal" company.
After 1933, the Nazis occupied and later confiscated union offices and printing presses, turning them over to the German Labor Front (DAF), the Nazis' trade union organization. The DAF was eventually required to provide the original capital of 50 million Reichsmark to establish the company known as the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (Company to Develop the German People's Car).

But a true automobile for the masses was not produced in Wolfsburg during the war. Only 630 Beetles were made there during World War II -- and distributed to the privileged.

Instead, the factories were used in weapons production, to manufacture tank chains, mines and an all-terrain vehicle that came to be known as the Kübelwagen ("bucket-seat car"). Thousands of forced laborers were later used, including Jews from concentration camps and prisoners of war, mostly from the Soviet Union and Poland.

'Cheap Eastern Workers'
 
Porsche's son-in-law, Anton Piëch, began managing the plant in 1941. In his study "The Volkswagen Plant and Its Workers in the Third Reich," the German historian Hans Mommsen writes: "In the summer of 1943, Anton Piëch bluntly declared that he had to use cheap Eastern workers in order to fulfill the Führer's wish that the Volkswagen be produced for 990 Reichsmark."

In the early 1990s, this part of the history of the VW Group caught up with Ferdinand Piëch, the son of the former plant director Anton Piëch. Ferdinand Piëch, the head of Audi, was trying to rise to the top of the Volkswagen Group.

Piëch, who had pushed aside a number of executives along his career path, had his share of enemies. Some of them spread the rumor that Piëch was incapable of being the head of VW, hinting at the headlines it would produce in the important US market if the son of the former Wolfsburg plant director, who had used forced laborers, became the head of the modern-day VW Group.

Ferdinand Porsche himself served Hitler during the war as the head of his tank commission. He supported Hitler's power and profited from the regime. Nevertheless, Mommsen believes that "the question as to the extent to which Porsche understood the criminal character of the regime he served must remain open." 

 

For Mommsen, Ferdinand Porsche is "the prototype of the expert interested solely in technological matters." An Allied investigative commission later declined to file charges against Porsche, although he, his son Ferry and his son-in-law Anton were imprisoned in France for several months.

When Ferdinand Porsche died on Jan. 30, 1951, he left behind an estate distributed across two businesses: the design engineering firm in the Stuttgart suburb of Zuffenhausen, which would later develop into the Porsche sports car company, and the Porsche dealership in Salzburg, Austria, which would become Europe's largest car dealership.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

The Book Thief -- The Film

Based on a marvelous (if sad) book by Australian author, Markus Suzak, which features a rather sympathetic narrator:  Death.



Have you seen this film yet?  I've heard it's wonderful.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Subversive Religious Freedom Advocate

Posted on February 3rd, 2014 Culture, Thought Reform | 0 Comments

Feb. 4th marks what would be the 108^th birthday of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An outspoken pastor, theologian, underground seminary professor, and spy against the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer’s young life was sadly cut short at the hands of Nazi interrogators.
Throughout his dynamic ministry, Bonhoeffer challenged both the Church and State to recognize and assume their providentially assigned roles. He implored the Church to be a faithful witness in a rapidly deteriorating society. And he spoke out against the grave abuses of governmental power.
While many of his contemporaries were either silent or conflicted in the face of quickly disintegrating freedoms, Bonhoeffer was a strong and steady voice of moral precision.
His story serves as a reminder of the necessity to be an active participant in the public square, particularly as it relates to preserving a just society.
Consider Bonhoeffer’s words to a generation faltering under the grinding pressures of a corrupt regime:
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in the prime of his life – only 39, and recently engaged. Yet even though he was young, Bonhoeffer had a profound influence on his generation and those that came after him.
As we honor the memory of Bonhoeffer, it’s crucial to remember that we also have the privilege and responsibility to engage in the public square. Though we are young, our voices matter and can have lasting and meaningful impact, not just in our time, but for future generations as well.

Bonhoeffer was hung on April 9 for his connection to ABWEHR, a subversive group trying to put an end to Hitler.  Two weeks later, the labor camp where this happened was liberated by US soldiers of the 90th and 97th Infantry divisions.  --Wikipedia

Hitler spricht...ein Dialog in Mannheim

I've posted this conversation between two Austrians before, but here are subtitles, which helps us to fill in those gaps. 

Lebensborn, 1935

Q:  Was Lebensborn a 'breeding station for Aryan women and SS men" or was it an orphanage?  It's hard to know just what to believe...(-CS)

A:  Lebensborn" was probably all of the above.... It was a program to increase the supply of 'nordic' types. As far as I remember there was a 'breeding' section as there was an attempt to 'Germanify' nordic-looking children from the conquered races in orphanage settings. The Nazis took some of the stigma away from single motherhood -- one of the many strange and unexpected ways in which the Hitler years and their aftermath modernized Germany by smashing traditional institutions.  (-- EKO)

Neugierig?  (Curious?)   Hier ist mehr:

SPIEGEL Online  November 07, 2006 – 05:01 PM

Nazi Program to Breed Master Race: Lebensborn Children Break Silence

By David Crossland in Wernigerode

After decades of hushed shame, the children of the Lebensborn program to create a blond, blue-eyed master race have started to speak out. Topic number one is the painful search for their true parents. And then that nagging question: "Was my father a war criminal?"

David Crossland

Guntram Weber, 63, found out his father was an SS major-general who escaped a death sentence for war crimes.

They were bred to be the elite of Hitler's 1,000-year Reich but ended up cowed by shame, alienation and uncertainty for decades.  Now aged over 60, the children of the Nazis' "Lebensborn" ("Spring of Life") program to create an Aryan master race are starting to go public with their plight and are renewing efforts to find out who their true parents were.

More than 30 Lebensborn children, by no means all of them tall and fair, met at the weekend in the sleepy eastern town of Wernigerode, site of one the program's birth clinics. The meeting was organized by a self-help group called "Traces of Life" which was set up last year to swap experiences, aid research and explode some of the myths surrounding the scheme.

Some 8,000 children were born in Germany and around 12,000 in Norway as part of Lebensborn, formed by SS leader Heinrich Himmler to encourage women of “pure blood” to bear blond, blue-eyed children.

Historians have refuted the public’s perception that it was a system of Nazi stud farms where SS zealots mated with each other. But it was an integral part of a murderous racial policy that stretched from the forced sterilization of people with hereditary diseases to the killing of 6 million Jews.

Founded in 1935, Lebensborn was designed to halt the high rate of abortions in Germany which rose as high as 800,000 a year in the inter-war years because of a chronic shortage of men to marry after World War I. Its aim was to prevent 100,000 abortions and its statute stated that it was to support "racially and genetically valuable families with many children."

It enabled unmarried pregnant women to avoid social stigma by giving birth anonymously away from their homes, often under the pretext of needing a long-term recuperation. About 60 percent of Lebensborn mothers were unmarried. Lebensborn ran children’s homes and an adoption service if the mother didn’t want to keep the child.

It even had its own registry office system to keep true identities secret. Most documents were burnt at the end of the war. That, together with the refusal of many Lebensborn mothers to tell their children about the program, has made it very difficult to find the truth.

Three-year-old "SS Bastard"

David Crossland

Father an SS officer, mother a Lebensborn secretary: family therapist Gisela Heidenreich.

In many cases the fathers were married members of the SS who had obeyed Himmler’s instruction to spread their Aryan seed even out of wedlock.

Gisela Heidenreich, born in a Lebensborn clinic in the Norwegian capital of Oslo in 1943, realized that there was something wrong when she was three or four years old and overheard people referring to her as the "SS bastard."

Her mother, a secretary for the Lebensborn program, had become pregnant after having an affair with a married SS officer, and had travelled from Bavaria to Oslo to give birth discreetly in a Lebensborn clinic. She refused to answer her daughter's questions about the father, and Gisela didn't find out who he was until she was an adult.

Her own reaction to locating her father has helped her understand why so many Germans lived with the crimes and cruelty of the Nazi regime, she said. "When I first met him it was on a station platform. I ran into his arms and all I thought was ‘I've got a father,’" Heidenreich, strikingly tall with clear blue eyes and greying blond hair, told the Wernigerode meeting. "I accuse myself of shutting out who my father was. I never asked him what he did. My own reaction has helped me to understand how people in those days just put the blinders on and ignored the terrible things that were happening.”

Hitler believed the “Nordic race” was destined to rule the world. But many Lebensborn children struggled through life yearning for the truth about their family history, wondering if their father was a war criminal, feeling inadequate and alienated from their foster parents or mothers, or ashamed of their illegitimacy and association with a murky Nazi project.

"My father the war criminal"

Guntram Weber, 63, a creative writing teacher from Berlin, knew for decades that his mother was lying about his father. His mistrust was so great that he would pore over history books looking for photos of soldiers that could be his father, or of women concentration camp guards that looked like his mother.

"My mother told me my father was a truck driver for the Luftwaffe who had never fired a gun and died in Croatia when he drove over a landmine. She told me she had married him in 1938 on a beautiful sunny day and that they had driven to church in a horse-drawn cart. She said she didn't want to say any more about him because it was too painful," said Weber. "But there were no documents and no photos.”

SPIEGEL TV

A girl getting her face measured: the Nazis wanted "racially and genetically valuable children."

Acting on a hint from his step-father, Weber started researching when he was 58 and found out that he was a Lebensborn child and that his father was an SS major-general convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death by a Polish court in 1949. He had escaped to South America and died peacefully in Argentina in 1970.

"From one day to the next I knew my father was a war criminal," said Weber, tall and quietly spoken. „He was a man who allowed himself everything. And the SS enabled him to live that way. I assume my mother fell in love with a powerful military man. And he obviously couldn't resist any woman. It gave me a feeling of low self-esteem, of loneliness, of uncertainty. But then I came to one of these meetings and found out that other Lebensborn children had gone through the same experience," he continued. "It was a huge relief for me, although I haven't been able to shake this feeling of inadequacy. Maybe in 10 years it will be gone. It's important that other children in Germany and abroad hear about this group because it could help them," said Weber.

There were 14 Lebensborn clinics in Germany and Austria, tucked away in small towns safe from Allied bombing, and nine in Norway where the Nazis had encouraged German soldiers to have children with women of “Viking” blood.

The children’s suffering was worst in Norway, where many never recovered from the stigma of having a German father. Some were put in mental asylums as Norwegians feared they spread German genes and create a hostile “fifth column.”

Clinics were also set up in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Luxembourg.

Tumbling through life

The alienation has left many children missing the security and warmth of family ties. Volker Röder, 62, a Lebensborn child living in Berlin, said: “I tumbled through life till I was 50 and met my wife.”

Given up for adoption by his mother, he was taken from a Lebensborn home in 1945 by foster parents. “They just wanted a kid to help them get through the Russian lines to the West,” said Röder. The parents later handed him to another children’s home. In 2001, his wife encouraged him to travel to Wernigerode and find his real mother.

“We immediately found out that she was living in an old folk’s home here. I went and the first thing she said was ‘There you are. I've been waiting for you!’ I was speechless. I see her occasionally but she still won’t talk about that time. I'm bitter and angry about it but my wife has helped me deal with it. At least I found out that my father wasn’t a war criminal, that was a relief. He was a policeman and even joined the Social Democrat party in 1936, which was unusual.”

The entry requirements for the Lebensborn clinics were as strict as for the SS itself. The women had to prove that both they and the father were of Aryan stock back to their grandparents. Modern equipment and qualified staff made the clinics popular with the pregnant wives of SS and Nazi officials as well.

The children were often christened in an SS ritual in which the SS dagger was held over them as the mother swore allegiance to Nazi ideology.

Gold medal for eight children

The Nazis offered incentives to German women to bear many children. Mothers with three and more children under 10 years old got "honorary cards" allowing them to jump shopping queues and get discounts on their rent payments. Cheap state loans were offered for parents, and there was the "Mother's Cross" medal: bronze for four children, silver for six and gold for eight.

It's common for the mothers of Lebensborn children to refuse to speak about the project. “They build a wall of lies and then someone comes along and threatens to tear it down. It's almost life-threatening to them. That's why they don't talk,” said Heidenreich, who wrote a book about her own search for the truth.

“Many women swore the SS oath ‘My honor is loyalty' which still seems to play a role in their lives. They'd rather die than say the truth.”

Tired of hearing lies, many children stopped asking and got on with their lives. But now as pensioners, the curiosity has returned, and they can look back on their past with more detachment.

"As you get older you get more interested in your youth. Being a registered association gives us a better chance to get information from archives and authorities," said Peter Naumann, chairman of Traces of Life. "A lot of us have only recently started to try finding out about where we came from."

Heidenreich said she wanted to keep younger German generations aware of their past and combat recent regional election victories for neo-Nazis. "I'm appalled how pupils listen to Nazi history with incredible distance these days. They know a lot about it but it doesn't touch them emotionally. It's like ancient Rome to them," said Heidenreich.

"It's our duty to tell our stories."

American Scholar, Mildred Fish Harnack

 Op-Ed Contributor to the New York Times

When the Red Orchestra Fell Silent

By SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC

Published: February 15, 2013

On Feb. 15, 1943, a green police wagon left Charlottenburg Women’s Prison in Berlin, making its way through streets pockmarked by Allied bombs to the infamous execution center at Plötzensee. The handcuffed prisoner, a 40-year-old American woman, scholar, journalist, lecturer, teacher and translator named Mildred Fish Harnack, was led to a first-floor death cell. She was beheaded the next day.

Then, for many years, Mildred’s reputation — like those of many who resisted Hitler in Germany before and during World War II — became hostage to the Cold War.  In the West she was depicted as a Soviet spy, in the East as a Marxist saint.  But she was neither, and only after the Berlin Wall came down and secret files were declassified was Mildred’s humanity restored, as poignantly defined by her final hours. 

She spent them translating lines of Goethe into English and receiving a welcome visit from Harald Poelchau, the prison pastor who had borne witness to the execution of a thousand resisters — including men and women belonging to the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen group or those caught in the failed July 20 conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. 

They discussed the Bible, then Goethe, and finally Poelchau described her husband’s brave end three days before Christmas. Arvid Harnack’s petition to see Mildred before his execution had been denied. During his final hour, Arvid asked if the chaplain could recite “Prologue in Heaven” from Faust. And as Poelchau prepared to leave, Arvid asked him to join in singing the chorale, “I Pray to the Power of Love.” 

In his last letter to his wife, Arvid wrote that “despite everything,” he looked back on a life in which “the darkness was outweighed by the light” largely because of their marriage. He recalled that their “intense work” meant that their life was never easy. 

After Hitler’s rise to power, the couple had founded an underground group that 

• helped imperiled Jews, 
• assisted forced laborers, 
• documented and archived Nazi acts of violence, especially in occupied areas in the East, 
• and distributed anti-Hitler pamphlets. 

Mildred used her work as an English instructor to 

• recruit resisters to travel abroad to assist potential émigrés.  

Her close friendship with Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador, William Dodd, enabled her to obtain elusive visas to the United States. 

Mildred had met Arvid, a German student in the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship, while a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  Following their marriage, the couple in 1929 settled in Germany, where they gathered a study group of artists, writers, academics and government officials. After 1933, this literary salon became a network of resisters, and in 1940, Arvid Harnack established contacts with Soviet intelligence.  The group, subsequently named “Red Orchestra” by the Gestapo to underscore its ties to Soviets, was led by Arvid, by then an official in the Economics Ministry, and by Lt. Harro Schulze-Boysen, a member of Hermann Goering’s staff. 

For nine months, the group provided vital military information to Moscow in the run-up to the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. During the same period, Arvid Harnack met regularly with the first secretary of the American embassy, Donald Heath, for long walks in Berlin’s parks and forests, using their wives as cover. Thus Arvid kept Washington informed on the state of the Third Reich’s economy, its trade agreements, rearmament and war plans. 

On two trips to the United States in 1938 and 1939, Arvid Harnack (with Heath’s help) met with Treasury officials and passed information about German assets in the United States.

After the Germans intercepted a radio communication, 120 persons were arrested by the Gestapo. Mildred and Arvid were arrested on September 7, 1942.  After a secret trial, Arvid was sentenced to death. Mildred received a sentence of six years hard labor for “the preparation of high treason and espionage.” Hitler heard this after the German defeat at Stalingrad and refused to confirm the sentence.  She was retried and sentenced to death. 

Mildred’s last words, before she was executed on Feb. 16, 1943, were: “And I have loved Germany so much.” 

For many years after the war, resisters remained suspect in West Germany, unwelcome reminders that opposition had been possible.  Members of the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen group were dismissed as Soviet spies. By contrast, East Germans celebrated them as anti-fascist heroes who lent a measure of legitimacy to the Soviet-imposed regime. 

After German reunification in 1990, I was able to obtain intelligence files from the United States, Russia and several East German archives, and to interview relatives and survivors. German scholars and I were able to piece together material that allowed a more nuanced account of the activities of the group. The “Red Orchestra” group came to be known as the “Harnack-Schulze-Boysen” group.

Two streets in Berlin and in Giessen — where Mildred received her doctorate — were named after her; memorial plaques dedicated to both Harnacks have appeared on public buildings in the German capital. 

In 2007, the German artist Franz Rudolf Knubel, with the help of students of the Mildred Harnack High School in Berlin, created a memorial exhibit inspired by Mildred’s translations of Goethe. The exhibit was shown in Berlin and other German cities, as well as at the Hillel Foundation in Madison and at Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum. In 2011, Wisconsin Public Television aired a one-hour documentary film about her. Sept. 16, the date of her birth, has been designated Mildred Harnack Day in Wisconsin. 

Many letters by members of the group have now been published. They include Schulze-Boysen’s final letter to his parents. “It is common in Europe for spiritual seeds to be sown with blood,” he wrote. “Perhaps we were simply a few fools; but when the end is this near, one perhaps has the right to a bit of completely personal historical illusion.” 

Shareen Blair Brysac is the author, among other works, of “Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra.”

Erwin Jöres wird 100 Jahr alt

Was all of this really that long ago?   Here's a man who has seen plenty, and certainly has a story to tell.  
IM ORIGINAL
http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article109642851/Vier-Mal-Haft-unter-Hitler-Stalin-und-Ulbricht.html 
Translated by Military Fotos. net

Cured - or so you could call the state of mind of Erwin Jöris. 
Cured of any totalitarian idea, every temptation of the extremes.



The resident of Cologne, who has lived in the same apartment for 57 years, has survived everything you could survive in the 20th century. Jöris fought in the political riots of the crumbling Weimar Republic, he was sent to a Gestapo jail, deported to a concentration camp and made it through the infamous Moscow "Hotel Lux" and NKVD imprisonment.

Having been deported to Germany, he was again imprisoned by the Gestapo, released on "probation" to endure five years of war including four years on the Eastern Front. During the "Battle of Berlin" he was captured and released into the Soviet occupation zone in 1946, only to catch the eye of the new rulers, being arrested again and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in Siberia. In 1956 he could finally return home along with the last German prisoners of war.

There are few stories like that of Erwin Jöris - people who would have fought the two worst tyrannies to ever gain hold in Europe, and lived to tell the tale. Margarete Buber was one of them, who was also a prisoner of both Stalin and Hitler, though she died in 1989 at the age of 88. Another one is that of Jöris, who celebrates his 100th birthday today.

Both hung in their youth-time communist ideals, and both realized too late that behind the promises of a better world in the sense of Marx, Engels and Lenin there only hid a power-hungry self-proclaimed avant garde. Both were declared enemies of the inhumane Nazi regime and paid for their views with time in concentration camps, the very symbol of the Hitler regime. Both found home in a certainly imperfect Federal Republic of Germany after the war.

The life of Erwin Jöris seemed mapped out early. Born into a working class family, he grew up in a leftist family similar to Erich Honecker (who was a bit older; and ultimately served East Germany as its last significant president)- in Berlin-Lichtenberg though (not in the Saarland). At the age of 16 he joined the Young Communists League and made a name for himself. But in 1931 he already refused to follow the party's every change of course when the Communists supported a Nazi attempt to oust the democratic government of the state of Prussia. Being a young KPD member, he caught the Gestapo's attention soon after the takeover in 1933. He was arrested and imprisoned in the early Sonnenburg concentration camp. Here he experienced the "particularly painful" lack of solidarity of former "comrades" who had joined with the Nazis.

For his pledge to refrain from any political activity, Jöris was set free in March 1934.

The now illegal Communist Party sent him to Moscow to undergo ideological training there. Upon arrival Jöris already got to know the darker side of the purported "workers' paradise."  He was harassed by a control commission, saw the misery on the streets and the megalomaniac projects that were hardly different from the Third Reich, as was the personality cult surrounding Stalin. Jöris voiced protest and as a consequence was forced to work in a heavy machinery factory in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). With the beginning of the "Great Terror" - the series of show trials and mass executions in Stalin's empire - Jöris finally began to lose his faith in Communism. His change of mind did not escape the eyes of his Soviet hosts: the unruly 25-year-old was labelled a "Trotskyist", arrested and taken to the Lubljanka, the headquarters of the NKVD.

From here the Soviets eventually deported him back to his native Germany.  Jöris, now back in the clutches of the Gestapo as an alleged "traitor", survived the torture.  But his former comrades, who had formed a resistance movement against Hitler, also saw him as a traitor. It was getting lonely for him. Then came the year 1940's general mobilization and Jöris, who was not considered "unworthy to serve", was drafted into the military on probation. He fought during the entire campaign in the East and to the very bitter end in Berlin in April 1945.  There he had some luck after all: he was quickly released from Soviet captivity, perhaps because he had kept silence about his former life.

Hoping he could build on the ideals of his youth, he joined the newly formed SED which had arisen from a forced merger of the SPD and KPD in 1946. But soon after Jöris would become a pain in the back of the powerful once more. Instead of submitting to the instructions of the Stalinist returnees among Walter Ulbricht, he would praise the pre-war Communists of Germany for spite.

As the inevitable consequence he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in the gulag.

During the trial the judge hurled at him: "Your damn yap will freeze up in Siberia!"  Not intimated at all, Erwin Jöris replied: "And so will yours!"

In 1956, he was able to return to East Germany after many years of mining in Vorkuta, from where he left to West Germany as quickly as possible.

Since then he has lived in Cologne.

In recent years he often made appearances to tell of the events he witnessed at public events and in schools. He has become unable to do that now.

All things considered he is still quite fit, though. He has described his experiences in several documentaries and his memoirs called "A life as a prisoner of Hitler and Stalin". Akin to Margarete Buber-Neumann's much better-known "The prisoner of Stalin and Hitler," the out-of-print book is very disturbing.