In the early hours of December 7, 1935, the Gestapo came for Liselotte Hermann at her parents’ home in Stuttgart. They had been watching her network for some time, an agent working inside it, and now they moved. They searched the house and found what they needed: incriminating documents, banned Marxist books, and even the plans for a secret munitions plant that her group had uncovered. She was arrested on the spot.
She was twenty-six years old, the mother of a small son, and she had been working against the Nazi regime for years. What followed was nineteen months of imprisonment, torture, and interrogation that would end, despite a wave of international protest, with her head beneath the blade of a guillotine. To defy the Nazis inside Germany was a grave risk. Those discovered were often executed in horrific fashion, and the police state built by organizations such as the Gestapo was designed to find opponents and deal with them brutally.
Resisters, once arrested, were routinely interrogated and tortured for information before being executed by firing squad or by the guillotine. It has been estimated that the Gestapo arrested and interrogated some 800,000 Germans believed to be linked to resistance groups, and around 15,000 of these were executed for their opposition. Resistance took many forms. There were members of the government and officials who defied Hitler’s wishes, and there were grassroots movements like the White Rose, a group of students and academics who spread anti-Nazi propaganda urging ordinary Germans not to conform.
The White Rose was brutally crushed with the executions of Hans and Sophie Scholl. Opposition could also be found within the Catholic and Protestant churches, and even inside the army itself. When Hitler seized power, he used the SA to stamp out resistance, particularly from communists, the direct enemies of the Nazis. Hitler hated communists and took specific steps to ensure they were persecuted and repressed, especially in the wake of the Reichstag fire, which was pinned on a young Dutch communist.
Hitler quickly suppressed all political parties, including the communists. The KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, was forced to maintain an underground network, but the Gestapo frequently infiltrated these networks and arrested and executed significant numbers of KPD activists. Many more were sent to the concentration camps that were opening up across the Third Reich. But despite the Nazis’ control of the German state, they had not destroyed communism as an ideology within the German population.
Liselotte Hermann was born on June 23, 1909, in Berlin, and was known as Lilo to her friends and family. Her father was an engineer, and he provided her with a fairly liberal, middle-class upbringing that allowed her to make up her own mind about the world around her. Her family was largely unaffected by the social and economic turmoil that plagued Germany during and after the First World War. In the 1920s, the Hermanns moved a number of times before returning to Berlin, where Lilo was educated at prestigious schools.
In 1929 she was awarded her Abitur, the school-leaving certificate needed to enroll in a German university. She had already developed strong views about her country and the economic problems plaguing it. She was quiet, but passionate about politics, and it was said of her that she was honest and upright and told the truth to all, no matter who it may be. She loved nature and was artistic.
Her parents moved to Stuttgart in the summer of 1929, but Lilo stayed in Berlin, studying chemistry and working as a lab assistant. The political and social climate disturbed her. She believed that the movement of many people toward right-wing politics was very dangerous. She became attracted to Marxism and communism, and while a student she delved into these interests.
She became aware of cultural advances inside the Soviet Union and believed that communism was the best way forward for Germany. She joined the Berlin branch of the League of German Socialist Students, and went further, joining the Red Student Group. Through her various communist groups she met the author Friedrich Wolf, who later wrote of her that she was strong and devoted. By the end of 1931 she had joined the KPD itself.
She was an enthusiastic member and hostile to the Nazis. She was disturbed by Nazi students at the university and their violence against Jewish staff and students. She was threatened a number of times and even helped shelter those in danger. As Hitler consolidated control, the persecution of Jews and communists ramped up significantly at the University of Berlin, considered the intellectual heart of the capital.
The Nazis expelled 111 students, including Lilo Hermann. The justification was that she had signed a petition attacking the ideas of fascism and war, and the Nazis considered that enough to throw her out. She viewed Nazi ideology as dangerous and evil, and she had great disdain for Nazi policies. Following her expulsion she remained in Berlin, working in the underground communist networks under a false name.
She stayed active in communist youth groups and earned a wage by caring for young children. On May 15, 1934, she gave birth to a son, named Walter. She never married the child’s father because of her links to the underground networks, and she never confessed his name, for fear of him being arrested alongside her. It is believed the father may have been another resistance member named Walter Hiller, who was later sentenced to fifteen years hard labor in a prison camp, where he died days before the camp was liberated in 1945.
The Gestapo were infiltrating communist underground groups, and Lilo feared for her situation in Berlin. She moved to Stuttgart and worked as a secretary in her father’s business, but she continued her illegal political activities, ingrained in the small communist movements and the KPD organization there. She gathered information on the morale of industrial workers and informed the leaders. She was also tasked with finding out about plans for German militarization and rearmament.
Along with other communists, she discovered that the city’s industries were involved in creating materials for the army, which violated the Treaty of Versailles. Her organization uncovered plans for secret German army munitions facilities being built. Then she was betrayed. An agent had uncovered Hermann’s network and had been working inside it.
She was arrested at her parents’ home in the early hours of December 7, 1935. The Gestapo searched the house and found incriminating evidence and documents, including the plan for the munitions plant and banned Marxist books. She was taken into custody and held for nineteen months inside Stuttgart’s police jail. She was subjected to horrific physical, psychological, and emotional torture, and was beaten so badly that she attended one court hearing on crutches.
On one occasion, the Gestapo agents put her small son in the cell next door to hers and got him to ask when his mother was coming home. She was also warned that if she did not confess information about her comrades, her son would be Germanized, placed in the home of a Nazi family, and raised in that manner. She was taken to Stuttgart’s Gestapo headquarters for interrogations, but despite the horrific torture, she never gave anything up. She said, “I simply do not wish to make any further statements.
” With that, her file was marked with the notation that no change could be expected. This meant either she would be sent to a concentration camp, or more likely, put to death. Lilo was placed on trial along with other members of the communist underground network of Stuttgart. All five of them, at the People’s Court, were accused of having engaged in preparations for high treason.
The People’s Court was an establishment that always sided with the Nazis, was incredibly biased, and was notorious for sentencing resisters to death. The trial began on June 8, 1937. In the first few hours the courtroom heard evidence, and then in the afternoon all the deliberations of the court were held in private. Fourteen witnesses appeared.
On the morning of June 12, all five defendants, including Lilo, were found guilty. One defendant, Alfred Grossinger, was sentenced to twelve years hard labor, but Lilo and the other three were sentenced to death. They were taken to Berlin, and Hermann was imprisoned at the Berlin women’s prison on Barnimstrasse. In the spring of 1938 she was moved to Plötzensee prison for the final weeks of her life.
From prison she wrote letters to her parents, stating, “It is very difficult to leave and also say goodbye to a child, knowing that Germany will be destroyed by war. ”
Many European countries learned of her case and began to protest her death sentence. The fact that she was a mother was pointed out in protests in the United Kingdom, France, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and Belgium. The Nazi regime simply ignored them.
It was said that the protest letters were so overwhelming in their numbers that they turned into mountains. But Hitler had the final say, and he authorized her death sentence despite the global outrage. She was due to be executed using the guillotine at Plötzensee prison in Berlin on June 20, 1938. The Nazis used the guillotine for the beheading of those regarded as traitors, and it was seen as a swift and sharp way of killing.
Ernst Reindel was responsible for the execution sites in Berlin at the time, so it is possible that he carried out the execution, or that it was performed by Johann Reichhart, a prolific executioner who worked at Plötzensee. Reichhart was noted for his efficiency, with the condemned often being executed within seconds of arriving in the chamber. Lilo Hermann would have been taken from her cell in the prison, then taken into the execution chamber. Once she arrived, her identity would have been confirmed, and she was quickly handed over to the executioner and his assistants.
She would have been secured on a tipping board or a fixed bench, and once secured, placed in the guillotine. Within seconds she was beheaded when the lever was pressed to release the blade. Typically, executions using the guillotine took between three and ten seconds once the prisoner had been passed over to the executioner. That was how quick the process was.
Following Lilo Hermann’s execution, articles emerged in German newspapers disgusted with the death sentence. One woman wrote: “Was it necessary to kill a German mother because of her opinion? With 99 percent of the people on Hitler’s side, why did someone choose to make her baby motherless? ” In Britain, several aristocratic women wrote to Hitler with copies of British newspapers, saying that the execution of Lilo Hermann had caused negativity between the two nations and that it was now unlikely the two would ever have a political alliance.
In just over a year, the two nations would be at war. After the war, many streets in Germany were named after her, and childcare centers were named after her as well. However, this was largely erased after reunification in 1990, to remove all references to communism. Lilo Hermann remains a controversial figure in Germany.
Some see her as a valiant opposer of the Nazis who died for her beliefs. Others consider her to have been a communist whose own ideology was equally dangerous.
