Hitler attack 81 years ago: Son of Willy Brandt warns of fault of history

Actor and author Matthias Brandt warned of Adolf Hitler on the 81st anniversary of the failed assassination against growing glory.

“We are experiencing again today, it can also be seen in election results, how the poison of hatred, racism and exclusion seeps in and becomes noticeable in a brutalization of the handling, last but not least linguistic, through violence and conscious flaring with language pictures of the Nazi propaganda,” said the son of the former Chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD) as the main speaker at the central ceremony in the memorial Plötzensee in Berlin.

Suddenly people are “foreign bodies”, “not belonging”, should be “removed”. “All of this, citing an alleged biological or ethnic basis of German identity. What is the other way around than forgetting in history?” Said Brandt. His mother taught him that you had to decide. “The fact that doing nothing is also a decision – how many times that has been going through my head recently – namely a decision to look away, let it happen.”

Willy Brandt fled to Norway in front of the Nazis

Brandt’s father had fled from Nazi Germany in 1933 to protect himself from persecution. From Norway, the young man, born as Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm, then worked against the Nazi regime under the lid name Willy Brandt.

In the Former Pfiessensee penalty prison, more than 2,800 people were murdered in the Nazi dictatorship. 89 The Nazi judiciary in connection with the resistance of July 20 were killed between August 1944 and April 1945, according to the memorial.

Justice Minister appeals to responsibility

Federal Minister of Justice Stefanie Hubig warned at the event that Germany should not once again assume such a monstrous horror as he prevailed at the time. “Out of guilt, this responsibility follows for all of us.” Law and democracy are under pressure again, said the SPD politician. “We and we should and have to say all the more undeterred and louder, we don’t let the rule of law and democracy destroy ourselves again!”

On July 20, 1944, Wehrmacht officers around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg tried in vain to kill the dictator Hitler with a bomb, to overthrow National Socialist rule and end the Second World War. Stauffenberg and three other participants were shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock in the evening.

Where the Federal Ministry of Defense is also based today, a solemn venue of 250 recruits of the Bundeswehr is planned in the afternoon to commemorate.