This picture you may have seen, everyone is saluting the Nazi salute, only one person refuses to salute. It was not enough to be disrespectful, and he also crossed his hands on his chest, giving a feeling of defiance. Dare to openly provoke the authority of the moustache in such a cowhide, what will happen to this person later?
His name was Auguste Landmesser, and he was a worker at the Blom-Foss Shipyard in Hamburg, Germany (a shipbuilding company that still exists today). He was actually a Member of the Nazi Party and was once a fan of Hitler.
In 1935, Landmesser fell in love with and became engaged to Irma, a Jewish woman. The organization sent people to talk to Landmesser many times, but he insisted on love and refused to leave Irma. Eventually, the Nazis felt there was no cure for him and expelled him from the party. From this incident, it can be seen that although Landmesser was a member of the Nazi Party, he did not agree with the Nazi Party's concept of the Jews. In addition, love can really cross racial barriers.
Later, Landmesser and Irma were going to register their marriage, but their dreams were shattered by the Nazi authorities' promulgation of the Nuremberg Act.
The purpose of the Nuremberg Act was to preserve the purity of Germanic ancestry. The Act divided the Germans into several classes, the first being Germanic, the second being a quarter of mixed Jews, the third being one-half of mixed Jews, and the fourth being Jewish. If a German was to marry a second or third mixed-race Jew, a permit from the relevant authorities was required. It was absolutely forbidden for a German to marry a pure Jew. Irma was purely Jewish, so she could not register her marriage with Lander Mercer.
The Nuremberg Act prevented two lovers from marrying, but not from falling in love, and Landmesser and Irma still lived together (they later had two daughters).
On June 13, 1936, a German Navy training ship was inaugurated at the Blom-Foss Shipyard, and the shipyard workers listened to the shipyard leaders and remotely saluted Hitler. As Lander Messer became increasingly resentful of the Nazi authorities because of his marital problems, he refused to salute and folded his hands across his chest. However, there were many people on the scene at the time, and no one noticed Landmesser's move.
In 1937, Landmesser could not stand the increasingly strict policy of racial persecution by the Nazi authorities, so he took Irma and his family to flee to Denmark, only to be arrested. Lander Messer was charged with "defiling the race." In court, Landmesser argued that he did not know that Irma was pure Jew, and even Irma herself did not know that she was pure Jew.
The court later released Landmesser for lack of evidence, but warned him not to be with the Jewish woman Irma.
Landmesser still did not leave Irma and still lived quietly together. In 1938, when the Gestapo found that they were not separated, they captured Landmessay and Irma, sending one of their children to their grandmother's house and the other to a childless couple.
Landmesser and Irma were sent to two concentration camps. Two years later, Landmessy was released from prison, but Irma was completely unheard, and he inquired about Irma everywhere to no avail.
After his release from prison, Rand Messer was assigned to work for a transport company. In 1944, when the war in Germany was strained, Landmesser was forcibly pulled to serve as a soldier. Landmesser died in fighting in Croatia in October 1944, and he did not know irma's whereabouts until his death, and he did not know that Irma was executed in a concentration camp in 1942.
In 1991, the German "Die Zeitung" published this old photo about the situation of landmesser who refused to salute, and this photo has been widely known ever since.