Reinhold Lofy

Reinhold Lofy (born April 8, 1922 in Graach an der Mosel ; † September 7, 2010 in Trier ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Reinhold Lofy was the son of a postman who died in 1923 of the long-term effects of an injury sustained in the First World War. In 1929 his mother moved with him to Trier. There he became an altar boy in 1931 and a member of the German Scouting Society Sankt Georg , and he refused to join the Hitler Youth . In 1935 he was interrogated by the Gestapo for distributing pastoral letters . He was able to complete an apprenticeship in the surveying office of the city administration of Trier, where he was denounced for membership in the Catholic youth movement , but was protected by the head of the department.

From 1941 Lofy was first in the Reich Labor Service , then as a soldier on the Eastern Front. In 1942, near Voronezh , he refused the order to shoot a Russian for reasons of conscience. Despite this incident, Lofy was sent to the officers' school in Poznan in the spring of 1943 . After completing the course, he joined the 72nd Infantry Division as a lieutenant . On April 20, 1944, on the occasion of the “ Führer birthday ” , he received the order to lead a raiding party behind the enemy lines, avoiding the use of firearms and cutting off the heads of Russian soldiers with spades instead. Lofy considered this action to be militarily nonsensical and ethically irresponsible. Since a direct refusal of orders seemed impossible to him, he made sure that his squad was discovered early and could withdraw again under the fire. A little later he spoke critically in front of other soldiers about the murder of Jews and the existence of concentration camps . He was reported and initially held in solitary and dark detention in the Wehrmacht prison in Rawa-Ruska . Later, he entered the military prison of Tarnow and finally to the central prison in Germersheim , to send letters to their relatives, where he several inmates made possible by his good contacts with the prison chaplain. In January 1945 he was sentenced by a military court to six years imprisonment, loss of honor and demotion . He was transferred to the 500 Probation Battalion, which was deployed to the most dangerous front lines under the supervision of SS members . On April 19, 1945, Lofy was seriously injured by a tank shell near Brno , and his left upper arm had to be amputated in the field hospital . He took a hospital train to Freiberg , from there he made his way back to his home country on foot. The judgment passed against him was overturned as unlawful by the Trier Regional Court in July 1949 .

After the war, he studied at the Berlin School of Economics , where he received his doctorate and worked as a university professor. He also got into trouble in the GDR because he refused to do espionage services. He also identified a general in the National People's Army as his former division commander, who in 1944 had petitioned him for a death sentence for degrading military strength . In 1972 Lofy was allowed to leave Germany for Germany. There he campaigned against fascism for the rest of his life. He founded a support association for a memorial at the former SS special camp in Hinzert and, together with Eberhard Klopp, published a documentary in 1982 under the title Hinzert no real concentration camp? . He was also chairman of the Association of Democratic Resistance Fighters and Persecuted by the Nazi Regime and a board member of the Central Association of Democratic Resistance Fighters and Persecuted Organizations .

Wolfram Wette called him, among others, "a grain of gold under the great heap of rubble in German history during the Nazi era". The Prime Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Kurt Beck, praised Lofy as an "extraordinary personality" in an obituary.

literature

• Hermine Wüllner: Lieutenant Reinhold Lofy, murders denied. In: Wolfram Wette (Ed.): Rescuers in Uniform. Scope of action in the Wehrmacht's war of extermination . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-15221-6 , pp. 105-113.
• Roland Ries (Ed.): Caritas in the Diocese of Trier . Kliomedia , Trier 2006. ISBN 3-89890-094-0 , p. 411.

Web links

• Entry in the Stattführer Trier under National Socialism , 2005
• “We will miss him” , obituary at 16vor.de, September 15, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary notice  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Commemorative speech for Wilm Hosenfeld  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , June 19, 2009 (PDF; 23 kB)  
3. ↑ Press release of September 17, 2010  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.