by finn ballard | Oct 8, 2020 | Blog
This month, I am thinking of Elise and Otto Hampel, a working-class couple who lived on Amsterdamer Strasse in the Northern district of Wedding. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Germany under Nazism, they began in 1940 to write postcards denouncing Hitler and...
by finn ballard | Sep 24, 2020 | Blog
This month, let’s think about Julius Leber (born in 1891, executed on January 5th 1945). Leber worked as a journalist and teacher before volunteering for military service. Wounded during WWI, he remained in the German Army until 1920, when he resigned in the...
by finn ballard | Sep 10, 2020 | Blog
This month, let’s think about Hilde Meisel. She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, and her parents moved to Berlin while she was still an infant. As a teenager, she moved to England, where she joined the International Socialist Combat League,...
by finn ballard | Aug 27, 2020 | Blog
This month, I am thinking of August Landmesser, born on May 24, 1910, of whom rather little is known. He was a shipyard worker in Hamburg, and loved a Jewish woman named Irma Eckler. He had, in fact, joined the Nazi Party in the hope of gaining better employment, but...
by finn ballard | May 23, 2019 | Blog
This month, I am thinking of Rose Valland (1898-1980), art curator, who became one of the most highly-decorated women in European history. During Valland’s tenure at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the German occupying forces began to use the building to store...
