Liselotte Herrmann

Liselotte Herrmann (called "Lilo", 23 June 1909 – 20 June 1938, executed) was a German Communist resistance fighter in Nazi Germany.

Born in Berlin, Liselotte Herrmann had a middle class liberal upbringing.

Her father, Richard Hermann was an engineer who had to move several times to his job.

As a schoolgirl, she was influenced by socialist ideas in Frankfurt and eventually joined the National Socialist Schoolchildren's League (SSB) and the Young Communist League of Germany in 1928, and also became a member of the Red Students’ League (Roter Studentenbund).

In 1929 she completing her Abitur exams.

Her essay was on Friedrich Hebbel's tradegy, "Herodes and Mariamne".

After high school she initially planned to become a painter due the influence of Käthe Kollwitz but her father was against it and persuaded her to become a chemist instead.

So she went to work as a laboratory assistant in a chemical factory to prepare her studies in chemistry.

Later that year, her family moved to Stuttgart, where she attended the Technical College to study chemistry.

In the summer of 1930, she was fined for distributing leaflets in Esslingen.

She also joined the Revolutionary Union Opposition (Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition) in 1931, and in the same year became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Stuttgart.

In 1931, she moved to Berlin to study biology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

In Berlin, she became actively involved in volunteering with the KPD and began her political education by attending classes at the Marxist Workers' School.

Soon after the Nazis won the election in 1933, the KPD was outlawed after the Reichstag Fire Decree and formally banned on 6 March 1933.

In an attempt to resist the Nazis, she together with 111 other students signed the "Call for the Defence of Democratic Rights and Freedoms" declaration.

She was reprimanded and for political reasons expelled by the university on 11 July 1933.

From that point forwards, she was excluded from all German universities.

From then on, she worked illegally against Germany's Nazi government and socialized with the armed resistance within the KPD organisation.

When the KPD was banned, Herrmann hid the KPD official Fritz Rau (resistance fighter), eventually having a relationship by him.

The boy's father was arrested in December 1933 and died in the same month, while in Gestapo custody in Moabit prison.

In September of the same year, she moved back to Stuttgart to be with her family and found work as a shorthand typist at her father's engineering office.

She re–established contact with the KPD.

She temporarily took a job as a nanny and on 15 May 1934, her son Walter was born.

From late 1934, she worked as a technical aide to the Württemberg KPD district leader, Stefan Lovász, until his arrest in June 1935.

She obtained information about German re-armament concerning secret weapons projects — munitions production at the Dornier aircraft factory in Friedrichshafen and the building of an underground ammunition factory (Muna) near Celle — which were relayed to the KPD's office in exile that had been set up in Switzerland.

On 7 December 1935, Hermann was arrested in her family's apartment.

For three months, she was interrogated at the Stuttgart police prison, and from February 1936 she was held for 16 harrowing months in remand custody, whilst her young son had to be cared for by his grandparents.

Charged in the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof), Herrmann and Stefan Lovász, together with KPD officials and, were sentenced to death by the Second Senate in Stuttgart on 12 June 1937 for "treason in concomitance with preparation of high treason in aggravating circumstances".

Herrmann's fellow party member, Lina Haag, was held in the same remand prison at that time, and remembers the night she was sentenced in her book A Handful of Dust or How Long the Night.

Deported to Berlin, after another year in the Barnimstrasse women's prison, she was transferred to Plötzensee Prison for execution.

Despite international protests, Hermann was executed by guillotine on 20 June 1938.

Lovász, Steidle and Göritz were also put to death the same day.

The bodies of the five people were not buried, instead were handed to anatomy professor Hermann Stieve of Charité Anatomical Institute for medical research.

In the 1970s, students at the university tried to get a new residence named after her, but the university administration refused.

In 1988, unknown persons placed a simple memorial stone to her on the University of Stuttgart campus, which caused a stir.

"Lilo-Herrmann-Weg" was the city's tribute to her, but it is little more than a 100 m-long blind alley affording access to public and private parking.

No one lives there.

In East Germany, many schools, streets, and institutions were named after her, but after German reunification in 1990, many were given new names to erase all references to Communism.

Indeed, even in Stuttgart, where Herrmann studied, she has been a controversial figure.