Goerdelerdenkmal

Another place we went to last night, it was high on the itinerary. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig in the early 1930s, and an active force in several attempts to remove or assassinate Hitler. He was a conservative, Lutheran, a firm nationalist, but mostly opposed the Nazi. Like others in the early 1930s, while he didn't support Hitler's rise to power, he thought he would be controllable with the right pressure. As a result, he was constantly sending memoranda, advice, et cetera to Hitler and Goring, in his roll of Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, especially on economics.

As mayor, he actively opposed the boycott of Jewish owned businesses, even dressing in his full regalia and interfering with SA attempts to close and disrupt shops in 1933. His opposition continued, though he was softer on some issues such as Aryanization of professions, and believed in a fair number of common Antisemitic tropes.

He resigned as mayor in 1937. On the surface, his resignation came over the removal of a statue of Leipzig-born composer Felix Mendelssohn, but his disputes with the Nazis went far deeper, centered around their Antisemitism and insistence on rearmament and movement towards a command economy.

Goerdeler worked abroad and in Germany from 1937 to gain support for a putsch against Hitler. He was working for a military state, or a return to monarchy, and told his foreign contacts that this could be done, if the governments of the USA, UK, and France would return what had been taken from Germany in Poland and Czechoslovakia. (This is a gross simplification, but we're time limited here, and this isn't history class...)

He was involved in several major plots to eliminate Hitler, either through arrest or assassination, including the one most Americans known about, on July 20, 1944. He was, with many others, caught in that one. He didn't hold up well in prison, gave information in the "hope that it would overwhelm the authorities", though it just ended up with more people being arrested. Eight members of his family were arrest on Sippenhaft (blood guilt-- the crime of being related to an enemy of the regime). He was executed by hanging in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin February 2, 1945.

The Goerderler Monument is a well surrounding by passages from his writing, at the corner of the Neues Rathaus, the new city hall. Four times a day, chimes emanate from within, and we went out to hear it last night at 5:55. A very bad video follows, and pictures we took of the sight today. Czytaj więcej