August Landmeser - A hero whose love has bound his hands

A video about August Landmeser, a man who refused to salute Adolf Hitler on the launch of a naval ship, was broadcast on the YouTube channel "Šibalba". August Landmeser remained known in history precisely for that inaction, honorable and human. However, his story is far more complex. He himself belonged to the notorious party, until he accidentally met Irma Eclair, a girl of Jewish origin. As he fell in love, ashamed of his earlier actions, but also of the belated thought that we were people of any flag, he used every opportunity to propagate equality, at the same time mocking the Nazi regime. That amazing photo in which August smiles cynically was taken in 1936. Only decades later, the identity of the man in the picture was established.

August Landmesser 24 May 1910 - 17 October 1944was a worker at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. He is known as the possible identity of a man appearing in a 1936 photograph, conspicuously refusing to perform the Nazi salute with the other workers. Landmesser had run afoul of the Nazi Party over his unlawful relationship with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman. Later, he was imprisoned and eventually, he was drafted into penal military service, where he was killed in action.

August Landmesser was born in Moorrege in 1910, the only child of August Franz Landmesser and Wilhelmine Magdalene. In 1931, hoping it would help him get employment, he joined the Nazi Party. In 1935, when he became engaged to Irma Eckler (a Jewish woman), he was expelled from the party. They registered to be married in Hamburg, but the Nuremberg Laws enacted a month later prevented it. On 29 October 1935, Landmesser and Eckler's first daughter, Ingrid, was born.

In 1937, Landmesser and Eckler tried to flee to Denmark, but were apprehended. She was pregnant again, which led to his being charged and found guilty in July 1937 of "dishonoring the race" under Nazi racial laws. He argued that neither he nor Eckler knew whether she was fully Jewish. He was acquired on 27 May 1938 for lack of evidence, with the warning that a repeat offense would result in a multi-year prison sentence.

The couple publicly continued their relationship, and on 15 July 1938, he was arrested again and sentenced to two and a half years in the Börgermoor concentration camp.

Eckler was detained by the Gestapo and held at the Fuhlsbüttel prison, where she gave birth to their second daughter, Irene. From there Eckler was sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp, then to the Lichtenburg concentration camp for women, and next, to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. A few letters from Irma Eckler were received until January 1942. It is believed that she was taken to the Bernburg Euthanasia Center in February 1942, where she was among the 14,000 murdered. In the course of post-war documentation, in 1949, she was pronounced legally dead, with a date of 28 April 1942.

Meanwhile, Landmesser was discharged from prison on 19 January 1941. He worked as a foreman for the haulage company Püst. The company had a branch at the Heinkel-Werke (factory) in Warnemünde. In February 1944 he was drafted into a penal battalion, the 999th Fort Infantry Battalion. After fighting in Croatia on 17 October 1944, he was declared killed in action. Like Eckler, he was declared legally dead in 1949.