Lindner, Herta (1920–1943)

German anti-Nazi activist, executed at Plötzensee Prison, who resisted fascism and was active in efforts to bring about German-Czech reconciliation. Name variations: Hertha Lindner. Born in Mariaschein, Czechoslovakia (now Bohosudov, Czech Republic), on November 3, 1920; executed at Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, on March 29, 1943; daughter of Heinrich Josef Lindner.

Herta Lindner was born in 1920 into a German-speaking working-class family in an ethnically mixed German-Czech region of Czechoslovakia. She received much of her political education from her father, a class-conscious and militant miner, and, at age nine, joined the Socialist youth organization Rote Falken (Red Falcons). Throughout the next years, she witnessed the rise of fascist terror and racial hatred in her town. As a member of the German minority in a Czechoslovak Republic in which the overwhelming majority of the population was Slavic, Lindner believed that only a socialist and multiethnic society would guarantee permanent peace in Central Europe.

She and a minority of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia (ethnic Germans who had long lived in the area) supported the constitutional system and believed that the growing threat of Hitler's Germany could best be opposed by a strong alliance of German and Czech workers and intellectuals. Unlike many Germans who believed that their language and culture were superior to the Czechs', thus making themselves members of a "master race," Lindner thought neither group inferior. In keeping with her family's socialist and internationalist ideals, she attended both Czech and German schools and grew up speaking both languages.

As a militant anti-Nazi who opposed the pro-Hitler Sudeten German Party of Konrad Henlein, in 1937 Lindner joined the German Youth League (Deutscher Jugendbund), a successor to the banned Communist youth organization. She quickly emerged as the local leader of this entity, which carried on clandestine political work even before it was outlawed by the Prague government in 1938. In October 1938, the Sudetenland was annexed by Nazi Germany, and in March 1939 the remnant territory of Bohemia and Moravia was declared a "protectorate" by Berlin. Savage repressions of Jews, Marxists, and democrats now swept through the newly occupied regions, but Lindner and a small group of other German anti-Nazis refused to abandon their underground activities. Not yet 20, Lindner carried out her party assignments with courage and a cool head. In 1939, she moved to Dresden, where she found work as a salesclerk in the Müller grocery store and continued her dangerous political activities. As a cover for her underground cell, in 1940 she founded the Lindenbrüder Hohenstein Mountain Climbing Club in 1940, which permitted fellow anti-Nazis to meet on weekends and vacations for ostensibly innocent climbing trips while organizing future political work and carrying on ideological discussions.

While Lindner lived and worked in Dresden, her mother's health deteriorated. Lindner used much of her free time to travel to Mariaschein to be with her. It was on one of these trips, on November 27, 1941, that she was arrested by Nazi police who had uncovered details of her political activities. At the same time, her father was also arrested for his involvement in a subversive organization. For a full year, Lindner was jailed and interrogated in the town of Most. She was then taken to Berlin, where after a trial that bore little resemblance to a genuine judicial event she was found guilty of high treason and a sentence of death was announced in November 1942. Herta Lindner was executed in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, on March 29, 1943.

In the 1950s, after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the former Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany, Herta Lindner became universally recognized as a martyr of the militant anti-Nazi working class. Several streets and schools were named in her honor. On February 6, 1961, the GDR postal service issued a postage stamp with her likeness to raise funds for the preservation of the national memorials at the sites of the Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

sources:

Gostomski, Victor von, and Walter Loch. Der Tod von Plötzensee: Erinnerungen, Ereignisse, Dokumente 1942–1944. Frankfurt am Main: bLoch Verlag, 1993.

Grünwald, Leopold. Im Kampf für Frieden und Freiheit: Sudetendeutscher Widerstand gegen Hitler. Munich: Fides-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1979.

Kraushaar, Luise. Deutsche Widerstandskämpfer 1933–1945: Biographien und Briefe. 2 vols. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1970.

Partington, Paul G. Who's Who on the Postage Stamps of Eastern Europe. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia