Emma Hölterhoff

Emma Hölterhoff , née Maass (born May 28, 1904 in Homberg am Niederrhein ; † December 8, 1944 in Plötzensee prison , Berlin ) was a German housewife and a victim of Nazi war justice.

Life

Hölterhoff was the wife of a crane operator. Their marriage had had four children. After her house was damaged and uninhabitable by an Allied air raid on her place of residence Homberg, Hölterhoff was evacuated in 1943 (?) To the Memmingen area , where she was housed with a family named Goll.

(? 1942 or 1943) "In January of the fourth year of war" Hölterhoff sat with the woman Goll and her son, who just returned from the Reich Labor Service was dismissed, and two son befriended young men - among them a certain Arnold Haring - in the kitchen when man Don't get angry - play together. When the conversation turned to the war , she said that the young men were stupid to fight for National Socialism : If she, Hölterhoff, were sent to the front, she would throw away her rifle and play dead. She is also said to have badly insulted Adolf Hitler .

After a denunciation , Hölterhoff was taken into custody. She was finally indicted before the People's Court on 8 November 1944 by the People's Court under the chairmanship of Roland Freisler - assessors were among others the SA - because of the accusation of having made her statement to the young men guilty of degrading military strength . Group leader Felix Aumüller and the state police major Hans Meißner - found guilty and sentenced to death by beheading and declared a "forever dishonorable maid of our enemies". She was executed with the guillotine in the Plötzensee prison.

The background to the death sentence against Hölterhoff, as can be seen from Freisler's judgment, was the endeavor of the Nazi war justice system to maintain the population's willingness to go to war by imposing the greatest possible number of sentences of this kind through terror and intimidation or to suppress wishes for a peace treaty. Specifically, the experience of the First World War , in which, according to the National Socialists, such a development of the internal paralysis of the civilian population's readiness for war and perseverance at home - with the simultaneous alleged ability of the front army to militarily bring the war to a victorious conclusion - in the years 1917 and 1918 led to a creeping decline in war morale and finally to the internal collapse of the German Reich and thus to the defeat of Germany in the war that it was actually still able to win, as the home population stabbed the fighting armies in the back with their defeatism was. As it says in the judgment:

“But anyone who becomes such a corrosive agent of our war enemies must be removed from our midst. Because his behavior is a tremendous danger for our fighting people and thus for our victory, so for our life and our freedom. In such a case, once the offense has been clearly established, the assessment of the required punishment must be based entirely on Germany's need for protection. And this calls for the death penalty in order not to let a development like the one in World War I arise again. "

Today a stumbling stone in front of the house at Eisenbahnstrasse 52 in Duisburg-Homberg reminds of Hölterhoff.

literature

• Helmut Ortner: The executioner. Roland Freisler - murderer in the service of Hitler , Vienna 1993, p. 214 ff.

Web links

• Reprint of the death sentence against Hölterhoff in the digitization of the booklets on political education , issue 306 (crime and criminal law), 2010, p. 45