When Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, it marked the end of German democracy. Guided by racist and authoritarian ideas, the Nazis abolished basic freedoms and sought to unite all social classes and regions behind one leader. The Third Reich quickly became a police state where individuals could be arrested and imprisoned arbitrarily.
The Nazis used propaganda effectively to win the support of millions of Germans, facilitating persecution, war, and ultimately genocide. There was, however, some German opposition to the Nazi state. Critics of the regime often paid the ultimate price for their defiance.
One of them was the sister of Erich Maria Remarque, the most hated author in Nazi Germany. Her name was Elfriede Scholz.
Elfriede Scholz was the youngest of four children, born as Elfriede Remarque on March 25, 1903, in Osnabrück, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Peter Franz, was a bookbinder, and his wife, Anna Maria, was a housewife who dedicated her time to caring for the children.
As a child, Elfriede was often ill and was paralyzed for two years due to a lack of red blood cells and weak bones. When her mother Anna Maria died of cancer on September 9, 1917, Elfriede was only 14 years old.
Despite her health problems, Elfriede completed an apprenticeship as a tailor. She then ran her own salon, first in Leipzig and from 1929 in Dresden.
In January of that same year, her brother Erich Maria Remarque published his novel "All Quiet on the Western Front" in book form. The book describes the extreme physical and mental trauma suffered by German soldiers during the war, as well as the detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home.
It became the bestselling work of fiction in America for 1929 and sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages in its first 18 months in print. Remarque's realistic depiction of trench warfare from the perspective of young soldiers struck a chord with war survivors, soldiers, and civilians alike, and provoked strong reactions both positive and negative around the world.
Remarque's harshest critics were his own countrymen, many of whom felt the book denigrated the German war effort and that Remarque had exaggerated the horrors of war to further his pacifist agenda. The strongest voices against Remarque came from the emerging Nazi Party and its ideological allies.
In 1930, screenings of the Academy Award-winning film based on the book were met with Nazi-organized protests and mob attacks on both the movie theaters and audience members. Three years later, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power.
The Nazi leaders wanted more than just political authority. They wanted to change the cultural landscape, to promote what they considered traditional German and Nordic values, to remove what they called Jewish, foreign, and degenerate influences, and to shape a racial community aligned with Nazi ideals.
In the new Nazi Germany, a chief role of culture was to disseminate the Nazi worldview. One of the first tasks Nazi leaders undertook upon their ascension to power in early 1933 was the synchronization of all professional and social organizations with Nazi ideology and policy. The arts and cultural organizations were not exempt.
Joseph Goebbels, the minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, immediately strove to bring artists and cultural communities in line with Nazi goals. The government purged cultural organizations of Jews and others alleged to be politically or artistically suspect.
At the initiative of Goebbels, Remarque's writing was publicly declared unpatriotic and banned in Germany. Copies were removed from all libraries and restricted from being sold or published anywhere in the country.
Beginning on May 10, 1933, Nazi-dominated student groups carried out public burnings of books they claimed were un-German. The book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities, and works of prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires.
Among the authors whose books student leaders burned were Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, and Erich Maria Remarque. Nazi ideology vilified Remarque's unflinching description of war in "All Quiet on the Western Front" as a literary betrayal of the soldiers of the First World War.
The true reason, however, was that with the Nazis remilitarizing Germany, Remarque's book was deemed counterproductive to German rearmament. The book burning stood as a powerful symbol of Nazi intolerance and censorship.
In the aftermath, the Nazi regime raided bookstores, libraries, and publishers' warehouses to confiscate materials deemed dangerous or un-German. The Nazi book burnings provoked international criticism from intellectuals and the press, who saw them as a barbaric act out of keeping with modern civilized society.
Germany was rapidly descending into a totalitarian society, leading to mass arrests of elements of the population of which the new governing order disapproved. While Remarque left Germany to live at his villa in Switzerland, Elfriede remained in Germany.
The Nazis did not forget about her brother. They claimed he was Jewish and also made the false claim that he had not seen active service during World War I, despite the fact that he had been wounded in combat. In 1938, his German citizenship was revoked.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In 1941, Elfriede married the musician Heinz Scholz, and they had two children.
Two years later, on February 2, 1943, after months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, the surviving German forces, only about 91,000 soldiers, surrendered at Stalingrad on the Volga. The Battle of Stalingrad ended with a capitulation and near-total loss of the Sixth Army, which was regarded as the best field army in the Wehrmacht.
Before the Germans surrendered, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had declared that the battle was a question of life or death and that all of German prestige, just as that of the Soviet Union, would depend on how it ended. He was right.
The battle for the city of Stalingrad proved a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward. Germany proved unable to defeat the Soviet Union, which together with Great Britain and the United States seized the initiative from Germany.
Germany's defeat shattered its reputation for invincibility and dealt a devastating blow to German morale. On January 30, 1943, the 10th anniversary of its coming to power, Hitler chose not to speak. Instead, Goebbels read the text of his speech for him on the radio.
The speech contained an oblique reference to the battle which suggested that Germany was now in a defensive war. The public mood was solidly depressed, fearful, and war-weary.
Elfriede Scholz made no secret of her critical stance toward National Socialism and the war. She told an acquaintance and customer at her tailoring shop that she did not believe in the propaganda of a German final victory and that the German soldiers on the front were nothing but beasts for the slaughter. She also said she would kill Adolf Hitler. She made similar statements to her landlady.
For these anti-state statements, as the Nazis called them, she would pay with her life. In the late summer of 1943, Elfriede Scholz was denounced, arrested, and then tried before the Nazi People's Court, which was infamous for its unfair political trials.
The head of the court, Roland Freisler, was known as the hanging judge, as about 90 percent of his trials ended in death sentences. During the trial, Freisler told Elfriede, "Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach, but you will not escape us."
On October 29, 1943, the People's Court under Freisler sentenced Elfriede to death for allegedly subverting the war effort and aiding the enemy. Her two pleas for clemency were rejected, and before the execution the Nazis shaved her head.
Elfriede Scholz was 40 years old when she was beheaded by guillotine on December 16, 1943, in Plötzensee prison. After the execution, her body was handed over to the anatomist Hermann Stieve, who used it for his research focused on the effect of stress and other environmental factors on the female reproductive system.
Not satisfied with taking Elfriede's head off, the Nazi executioner sent a bill for 90 marks for her execution to her family. Erich Maria Remarque was unaware of his sister Elfriede's fate until after the war.
At the time, he was in exile in the United States, where he had fled from Switzerland just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He only learned of Elfriede's death in June 1946, and in 1952 he dedicated his novel "Spark of Life" to her. He later said that his sister had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities.
Elfriede's death sentence was not repealed until 1998 through the German law on the abolition of National Socialist injustice in criminal law. Elfriede's bravery is honored in Germany to this day, and in her native Osnabrück a street bears her name.
Her story, as well as others like it, serves as a beacon of courage in the face of the unjust and cruel forces in the world.