1944: Johanna Kirchner, Frankfurt antifascist
June 9th, 2012 Headsman
“Keep Goethe‘s words in mind. ‘Die and become’. Don’t cry for me. I believe in a better future for you.”
-Johanna Kirchner’s last letter to her children
On this date in 1944, former social worker Johanna (“Hanna”) Kirchner was beheaded in Plotzensee Prison for treason.
Kirchner English Wikipedia entry | German) co-founded with Marie Juchacz after World War I the still-extant Workers’ Welfare organization: Arbeiterwohlfahrt, or “the self-help of the workers.”
These self-helping workers — both members of the socialist Social Democratic Party; Juchacz was a Reichstag member — had to flee to League of Nations-administered Saarland with the rise of the Nazi dictatorship … and from there, soon enough, on to France.
There the Vichy government arrested her in 1942 (Juchacz got out to the United States), and deported Kirchner to Germany to answer as a traitor.
She had a sentence of “only” ten years at hard labor, but the case was unexpectedly reopened in 1944 so that the cartoon villain of fascist jurisprudence, Roland Freisler, could give her a spittle-flecked death sentence for having “treasonably rooted herself in the evilest Marxist high-treason propaganda.”
Kirchner’s native Frankfurt has a Johanna-Kirchner-Straße, and in the 1990s awarded a Johanna-Kirchner-Medaille to anti-fascists.
On this day..
- 1980: Ten Hafizullah supporters - 2020
- 2010: Melbert Ray Ford, abusive partner - 2019
- 1944: The Massacre of Tulle - 2018
- 1863: Lawrence Williams and Walter Peters, bold CSA spies - 2017
- 1741: Cook, Robin, Caesar and Cuffee - 2016
- 90: Cornelia, Vestal Virgin - 2015
- 1715: Margaret Gaulacher, Cotton Mather ignorer - 2014
- 1809: Andreas Bichel, Bavarian Ripper - 2013
- 1904: Mart Vowell, aged Civil War veteran - 2011
- 1716: Banda Singh Bahadur - 2010
- 1864: Doctor Edmond-Désiré Couty de la Pommerais, poisoner - 2009
- 1983: Simon Thelle Mogoerane, Jerry Mosololi and Marcus Motaung, anti-apartheid soldiers - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Germany,Guillotine,History,Treason,Wartime Executions,Women
Tags: 1940s, 1944, anti-fascists, arbeiterwohlfahrt, fascism, frankfurt, johanna kirchner, june 9, marie juchacz, Plotzensee Prison, roland freisler, world war ii
