On this date in 1943, anti-Nazi student activist Willi Graf was beheaded at Munich’s Stadelheim Prison.
Graf was a conscientious Catholic whose disaffinity for Naziism manifested in an early refusal to join the Hitler Youth: he did a short stint in prison in 1938 for having continued associating with a banned Catholic youth league.
This subversive fellow might have been destined for the chop regardless in the black years to come, but for a thoroughgoing radicalization, he was drafted into the army as a medic and got a front-row seat on the Holocaust and the horrors of the eastern front.
During a 1942 study leave back in Munich, Graf met White Rose resistance figures Hans and Sophie Scholl and began participating in that circle’s distribution of illicit anti-Nazi leaflets.
He was arrested within months and condemned on April 19, 1943 to die as a traitor — though actual execution of the sentence waited several months on the Gestapo’s vain exertions to extract from their prey actionable information on other collaborators.
A number of schools around Germany are named in Graf’s honor.
On this day..
- 2019: Hervin Khalaf, Rojava politician
- 1942: Mark Retiunin's rebels of the gulag
- 1789: Five wheelbarrow men
- 2017: Robert Pruett
- 1984: Linwood Briley, terror of Richmond
- 1781: Benjamin Loveday and John Burke, "for the detestable Crime of Sodomy"
- 1883: Frederick Mann
- 1435: Agnes Bernauer
- 1901: Johannes Lotter, Boer War "rebel"
- 1565: Jean Ribault and the Huguenot colonists of Fort Caroline
- 1888: Pauline McCoy
- 1915: Nurse Edith Cavell, "patriotism is not enough"
I never heard of this wonderful man until today, as you don’t hear much about anti-Nazis. There were not many, but this man was as good as any, so please sir, do rest in peace!