On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, bringing an end to German democracy. Guided by racist and authoritarian ideas, the Nazis abolished basic freedoms and sought to create a unified racial community. The Third Reich quickly became a police state where individuals were subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
The Nazis used propaganda to win support for persecution, war, and ultimately genocide. Some Germans opposed the Nazi state, but critics often paid the ultimate price for their defiance. One of them was Elfriede Scholz, the sister of Erich Maria Remarque, the author the Nazis most hated.
Elfriede Scholz was born as Elfriede Remark on March 25, 1903, in Osnabrück, then part of the German Empire. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was a bookbinder, and her mother 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 died of cancer on September 9, 1917, Elfriede was only 14 years old. Despite her health problems, she completed an apprenticeship as a tailor and later ran her own salon, first in Leipzig and from 1929 in Dresden.
In January 1929, her brother published his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The book described the extreme physical and mental trauma of German soldiers during the war, as well as their detachment from civilian life after returning home. It became the bestselling work of fiction in America for 1929 and sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages within its first 18 months.
Remarque’s realistic depiction of trench warfare struck a chord with survivors, soldiers, and civilians alike. It also provoked strong reactions around the world. His harshest critics were his own countrymen, many of whom felt the book denigrated the German war effort.
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 theaters and audience members.
Three years later, Hitler and the Nazi party came into power. The Nazi leaders wanted more than political authority. They sought to change the cultural landscape to promote traditional German and Nordic values and to remove what they called Jewish, foreign, and degenerate influences.
One of the first tasks Nazi leaders undertook was the synchronization of all professional and social organizations with Nazi ideology. The arts and cultural organizations were not exempt. The government purged cultural organizations of Jews and others alleged to be politically or artistically suspect.
At the initiative of the propaganda minister, Remarque’s writing was publicly declared unpatriotic and banned in Germany. Copies were removed from 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. Works by prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires.
Among the authors whose books were burned were Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, and Erich Maria Remarque. The Nazis vilified Remarque’s unflinching description of war as a literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War. The true reason was that when the Nazis were remilitarizing Germany, Remarque’s book was deemed counterproductive to German rearmament.
The book burnings 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 burnings provoked international criticism from intellectuals and the press.
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 falsely claimed 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.
On February 2, 1943, after months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, the surviving German forces surrendered at Stalingrad. The battle ended with a near total loss of the Sixth Army, which was regarded as the best field army in the Wehrmacht.
Before the surrender, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had declared that the battle was a question of life or death. The defeat proved a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories and beginning the long retreat westward. Germany’s defeat shattered its reputation for invincibility and dealt a devastating blow to German morale.
On January 30, 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazis coming to power, Hitler chose not to speak. Instead, Goebbels read the text of his speech on the radio. The speech contained an oblique reference to the battle, suggesting that Germany was now in a defensive war.
The public mood was 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.
She also said that German soldiers on the front were nothing but beasts for the slaughter. She 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 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 that her brother was unfortunately beyond their reach, but she would not escape them.
On October 29, 1943, the People’s Court sentenced Elfriede to death for allegedly subverting the war effort and aiding the enemy. Her two pleas for clemency were rejected. 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 Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. After the execution, her body was handed over to an anatomist who used it for research focused on the effect of stress on the female reproductive system.
Not satisfied with taking her head, the Nazi executioner sent a bill for 90 marks for her execution to her family. Erich Maria Remarque was unaware of his sister’s fate until after the war. He was in exile in the United States, where he had fled from Switzerland just before the outbreak of World War II.
He only learned of Elfriede’s death in June 1946. 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. Her bravery is honored in Germany to this day. In her native Osnabrück, a street bears her name.
Her story, as well as others like hers, serves as a beacon of courage in the face of unjust and cruel forces in the world.