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Helmuth Hübener * 1925

Sachsenstraße 42 (Hamburg-Mitte, Hammerbrook)

Berlin-Plötzensee
27.10.42 enthauptet Berlin-Plötzensee

see:

Helmuth Hübener, born on 8 Jan. 1925 in Hamburg, executed on 27 Oct. 1942 in the Plötzensee State Prison, Berlin

last residential address: Sachsenstrasse 42

In Mar. 1923, Helmuth Hübener’s mother, Emma Kunkel, née Guddat, moved with her two sons from Tilsit (today Sovetsk, Russia) to Hamburg, thus separating for good from her first husband, the truck driver Johann Kunkel. In Hamburg, she began working as a laborer at the state mint, where she met the master minter Karl Oswald Vater. This relationship produced her third son Helmuth in 1925.

Until his adoption in Sept. 1941 by his mother’s second husband, the worker Hugo Hübener, Helmuth went by his mother’s maiden name (Guddat) as a last name. Due to their mother working constantly – later as a nurse doing nightshifts – Helmuth and his older brothers grew up for the most part of their youth at their grandparents,’ the Sudrows (Emma Guddat’s mother married Johannes Sudrow after the death of her first husband), who lived in the Hamm district and were, like the mother, members of the Mormon denomination. Living together with the grandparents most likely played a significant role in Helmuth’s religious involvement with the Mormons. When the mother got married to Hugo Hübener in the late 1930s, Helmuth was invited to move into their apartment on Sachsenstrasse, something he refused to do, however, because he had an aversion to his stepfather.

Raised in modest social circumstances in a working-class neighborhood, Helmuth turned out to be a talented student eager to learn, who stood out from his average classmates due to his varied interests. After six years of attending the eight-grade elementary school (Volksschule), he transferred to the so-called Oberbau (senior grades of elementary school or middle school) the school at Brackdamm in 1938. His homeroom teacher, Meins, later said about him, "His favorite school subjects were geography and history … he worked very much to improve himself and was very industrious. … Although he often went his own ways, you noticed that he was able to exert a lot of influence on other people.” After completing school with the intermediate secondary school certificate (mittlere Reife), Helmuth started vocational training toward a senior administrative career in the Hamburg welfare authority in Apr. 1941.

At first, the Nazi ideology seems to have appealed to Helmuth to a certain degree; in 1938, at the age of 13, he joined the Nazi "Deutsches Jungvolk” (literally, "German Young People”) and became a member of the Hitler Youth later. However, at the same time he was active in his denomination, which in time led to conflicts since the Mormons in part had to endure discrimination by the Nazi regime. For instance, their boy scout group was banned in 1934, and they were not allowed to promote their further education courses for youths in public. What outraged Helmuth in particular was that the religious community closed their meeting and worshipping premises under pressure from the Nazis.

As time passed, he was increasingly disgusted by the authoritarian social manners, the arbitrary harassments toward "different” persons, and the military orientation of the Hitler Youth, culminating in "military training exercises” ("Wehrertüchtigungsübungen”), which resulted in his ultimate distancing from and eventually active opposition to the Nazi regime. As early as 1940, he is supposed to have established contact to a Communist-oriented youth group in Altona around Josef Wieczorek, the son of a Communist detained at the time, secretly meeting up with members for political discussions and listening to foreign radio stations. When Josef Wieczorek was drafted into the German Wehrmacht in Feb. 1941, these contacts apparently ended and probably also the activities of the group.
In spring of 1941, Helmuth turned, in connection with his fledgling resistance activities, greater attention toward the district in which he resided.

In his grandparents’ home, he would now use a radio set, which his half-brother Gerhard had recently brought home as a soldier returning from France, to listen to the German-language broadcasts of BBC, thus gaining access to critical information about the Nazi regime and the war situation. In this connection, neither the Nazi propaganda nor the military successes of the Wehrmacht at the time succeeded in dissuading him from his certainty that eventually the German war of aggression was doomed to failure. In the summer of 1941, he began preparing small handbills on the typewriter of the Mormon congregation. They contained short slogans like "Down with Hitler! Seducer of the people, corrupter of the people, traitor of the people!”, and he distributed them in person among his circle of acquaintances, stuffed them in mailboxes, attached them to bulletin boards, and sent them by mail. Leaflets he authored included texts of varying length with information about the Nazi regime and the war situation all the way to political poems he had thought up himself.

In Aug. 1941, he confided in his friends Rudolf Wobbe and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, who were members of the Mormon congregation as he was, and he managed to win them to collaborate in distributing his oppositional leaflets. Shortly afterward, the administrative apprentice Gerhard Düwer, a colleague of Helmuth, joined up with the adolescent resistance group. Up to Feb. 1942, they distributed, in part assisted by other sympathizers, nearly 20 different handbills and leaflets in the Hamm, Hammerbrook, and Rothenburgsort districts. The texts of these consisted of information from foreign radio stations taken down in shorthand. Furthermore, the circle around Helmuth Hübener managed to initiate the establishment a group of sympathizers in Altona. According to a statement by Gerhard Düwer after the war, the resistance group had established contact to a printing firm in Kiel, with two of its employees supposedly agreeing to produce the leaflets in large numbers. Apart from sending the leaflets by letter to frontline soldiers, in the very end the group planned to pass information to prisoners of war interned in Germany in their respective native languages.

In the attempt to carry out the risky endeavor, Helmuth Hübener and Gerhard Düwer were observed approaching an administrative apprentice able to speak French in order to persuade him to translate one of their leaflets into French. Following a denunciation by the Nazi workers’ representative (Betriebsobmann) Heinrich Mohns, the two were arrested at their workplace on 5 Feb. 1942. It is known that Helmuth was severely mistreated by the Gestapo in order to force him into making a statement. However, he tried to protect his friends and assumed complete responsibility for the resistance activities. Tortured by the Gestapo, he revealed the names of Rudolf Wobbe and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, whose role he downplayed though. Nevertheless, both were arrested on 10 Feb. (Schnibbe) and 18 Feb. 1942 (Wobbe).

After several months in pretrial detention in Hamburg, Hübener, Schnibbe, Wobbe, and Düwer were transported to the Berlin-Moabit pretrial detention center in order to bring criminal charges against them in Aug. 1942. Following a seven-hour trial, in the course of which Helmuth Hübener courageously confessed that he intended to contribute to the regime’s downfall with his resistance group, he was sentenced to death for "preparation to high treason and treasonous aiding of the enemy” ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat und landesverräterischer Feindbegünstigung”), whereas his three comrades-in-arms received ten, five, and four years in prison. In this context, Helmuth was, due to his "intelligence ranking far above the average boy at his age” and his conduct, that "of a precocious young man having mentally outgrown youth long ago…” penalized "… as an adult.”

After the death sentence, Helmuth’s family submitted a clemency petition. The plea was supported even by the Gestapo in Berlin and indirectly also by the Hamburg-Ost Hitler Youth, which issued a relatively favorable "reference” for him. What ultimately decided the matter, though, was that the Reich Leadership of the Hitler Youth regarded the execution of the sentence as "necessary,” because otherwise there would have been the risk that "because of his crime, the resilience of the people in wartime might be impaired,” and that the clemency office within the "Chancellery of the Führer” followed this view. This eventually resulted in the definitive order to execute the sentence by Reich Minister of Justice Thierack on 15 Oct. 1942.

On 27 Oct. 1942 around noon, Helmuth was told about the rejection of the clemency petition, which he received "completely calm and composed.” That same evening, the authorities in charge carried out the execution of the 17-year-old youth with almost production-line precision (the duration of the execution was recorded down to the second) using a guillotine in the Plötzensee prison in Berlin.

A Stolperstein for Helmuth Hübener is located at Sachsenstrasse 2, in front of the gas station.

Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, Gefangenenkarteikarte der Strafanstalt Plötzensee, H. Hübener; VAN (Hg.), Totenliste Hamburger Widerstandskämpfer und Verfolgter, Hamburg 1968; Sander, Ulrich, Helmuth-Hübener-Gruppe; in: U. Hochmuth/G. Meyer, Streiflichter aus dem Hamburger Widerstand, Frankfurt/M. 1969, S. 325-41; Holmes, Blair R./Alan F. Keele (Hg.), When Truth was Treason. German Youth against Hitler. The Story of the Helmuth Hübener Group, Based on the Narrative of Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, Urbana/Chicago 1995.

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