Johanna Kirchner Assassinated (1944)

Fri Jun 09, 1944

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Johanna Kirchner was a German anti-fascist and Social Democrat who was executed by the Nazis on this day in 1944 for having “treasonably rooted herself in the evilest Marxist high-treason propaganda”.

Kirchner was born into a family with social-democratic traditions, and Kirchner herself joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) at the age of eighteen.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Kirchner, a known anti-fascist and opponent of the Nazis, fled to France. While there, she collaborated with Eleonore Wolf, organizing the emigration of many officials of the workers’ movement out of the Third Reich.

In 1942, Kirchner was arrested by the Vichy Régime and handed over to the Gestapo. Although she was initially sentenced to ten years’ hard labor for treason, her case was brought back before the Volksgerichtshof in 1944, and she was sentenced to death for “treasonably rooted herself in the evilest Marxist high-treason propaganda” and “treasonably gathering cultural, economic, political, and military intelligence and communicating” Marxism.

On the day of her death, she wrote to her children in her diary: “Keep Goethe’s words in mind, ‘Die and become’. Don’t cry for me. I believe in a better future for you.”