Last edited Sun Nov 24, 2024, 11:53 AM - Edit history (1)
to cross post in the World History group. I can cross-post it if you like. Thanks.]
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- Wiki, ed. - Helmuth Günther Guddat Hübener (8 Jan. 1925 - 27 Oct. 1942) was a German youth who was executed at age 17 by beheading for his opposition to the Nazi regime. He was the youngest person of the German resistance to Nazism to be sentenced to death by the Sondergericht ('special court') People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) and executed.
Life. Helmuth Hübener, born in Hamburg on 8 Jan. 1925, came from an apolitical, religious family in Hamburg, Germany. He belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).. Since early childhood, Hübener had been a member of the Boy Scouts, an organization strongly supported by the LDS Church, but in 1935 the National Socialists banned scouting from Germany. He then joined the Hitler Youth, as required by the government, but quit after Kristallnacht in 1938, when the Nazis, including the Hitler Youth, destroyed Jewish businesses and homes.
When one of the leaders in his local congregation undertook to ban Jews from attending its religious services, Hübener found himself at odds with the new policy, but continued to attend services with like-minded friends as the LDS locally debated the issue. His friend and fellow resistance fighter Rudolf "Rudi" Wobbe later reported that of the 2,000 Latter-day Saints in the Hamburg area, only 7 were pro-Nazi, but 5 of them happened to be in his and Hübener's St. Georg Branch (congregation), thus stirring controversy with the majority who were non- or anti-Nazis. After Hübener finished middle school in 1941, he began an apprenticeship in administration at the Hamburg Social Authority. He met other apprentices there, one of whom, Gerhard Düwer, he would later recruit into his resistance movement.
At a bathhouse, he met new friends, one of whom had a communist family background and, as a result, he began listening to enemy radio broadcasts.
Listening to foreign media was at the time strictly forbidden in Nazi Germany, being considered a form of treason.
In the summer of that same year, Hübener discovered his older half-brother Gerhard's shortwave radio in a hallway closet. It had been given to Gerhard earlier that year by a soldier returning from service in France. Helmuth began listening to the BBC on his own, and he used what he heard to compose various anti-National Socialist texts and anti-war leaflets, of which he also made many copies. The leaflets were designed to bring to people's attention how skewed the official reports about World War II from Berlin were, as well as to point out Adolf Hitler's, Joseph Goebbels', and other leading Nazis' criminal behaviour. Other themes covered by Hübener's writings were the war's futility and Germany's looming defeat. He also mentioned the mistreatment sometimes meted out in the Hitler Youth. In one of his pamphlets, for example, he wrote:...More,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_H%C3%BCbener
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