Elfriede Zabel

Elfriede Zabel (born May 11, 1885 in Breslau ; † May 10, 1944 in Plötzensee prison , Berlin ) was a German housewife and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Life and destiny

During the Second World War , Zabel repeatedly made derogatory comments to fellow residents of her house in Berlin about Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders. She once stated that the National Socialist dictator built his whole system on "lies and deceit". The one-party state is a "coercive and lying state". She herself never voted for Hitler and should still be allegiance to him. Besides, Hitler is a lazy man and a painter who never worked. Another time she explained that she would like to see Hitler, Göring and Goebbels "dangling" from street lamps and having their bellies cut open and their intestines pulled out after hanging.

After a denunciation, Zabel was arrested. She spent a long time in the women's prison in Barnimstrasse in Berlin before she was finally charged with undermining military strength before the People's Court . On March 21, 1944, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. In the grounds of the judgment, this sentence was implicitly justified in particular by the fact that the population was to be intimidated and disciplined by such deterrent measures, i.e. to be induced to continue the war in order to develop a similar development as it was according to the National Socialist interpretation of the history of the First World War , which had caused the German defeat of 1918. Literally it said:

"Frau Zabel is therefore a terrible and extremely dangerous agitator driven by the lowest feelings of hatred towards our Fuehrer, who with such speech attacks the strength of the people, their trust and their faith. She says she was national after all, because she adores Ludendorff and also threw flowers to troops returning from the Polish campaign. That may be, but it does not prove that she did not commit these current acts of treason. Nor does it want to recognize that there is no national ethos that is not National Socialist. Such a mean decomposition of our strength to survive in the struggle for life which fate has imposed on us, we must fight with the sharpest means. After all, we are a burned child who knows where it is going when you let the decomposition run free. Because we saw how 1917 became 1918! "

literature

Walter Wagner : The People's Court in the National Socialist State . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, pp. 350f., ISBN 3-421-01665-8 ; exp. New edition. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2011. With a research report for the years 1975 to 2010 by Jürgen Zarusky , ISBN 978-3-486-54491-6 , online .
Wolfgang Schumann : Germany in the Second World War. Volume 5: The collapse of the defensive strategy of Hitler's fascism on all fronts (January to August 1944). Military History Institute of the German Democratic Republic, Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED. Pahl-Rugenstein, Berlin / GDR 1984, ISBN 3-7609-0573-0 , p. 322.

Individual evidence

↑ The women's prison on Barnimstrasse ( memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. PDF, p. 7. @1@ 2

↑ According to the National Socialists' reading, the military collapse of the German armies in autumn 1918 was not the result of the superiority of the enemy, but rather the German defeat was brought about, despite the fundamental ability of its own armed forces to end the war victoriously, that the civilian population in the home of the army since 1917, due to selfish war weariness and unjustified doubts about the strength of their own armed forces, had "treacherously" stabbed in the back to an ever increasing degree, until the army in November 1918 under these " Stabs in the dagger ”by their own civilian population finally collapsed.

personal data
SURNAME	Zabel, Elfriede
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German housewife and victim of Nazi war justice
DATE OF BIRTH	May 11, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH	Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH	May 10, 1944
Place of death	Plötzensee prison , Berlin

[1] The women's prison on Barnimstrasse ( memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. PDF, p. 7. @1@ 2

[2] According to the National Socialists' reading, the military collapse of the German armies in autumn 1918 was not the result of the superiority of the enemy, but rather the German defeat was brought about, despite the fundamental ability of its own armed forces to end the war victoriously, that the civilian population in the home of the army since 1917, due to selfish war weariness and unjustified doubts about the strength of their own armed forces, had "treacherously" stabbed in the back to an ever increasing degree, until the army in November 1918 under these " Stabs in the dagger ”by their own civilian population finally collapsed.