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He wanted to be "most uncomfortable" as a prisoner

Actually, it was about discipline.

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He wanted to be "most uncomfortable" as a prisoner

Actually, it was about discipline. Journalists, that was the prosecution's message, had at least one foot in prison if they were critical of the Reichswehr. On March 30, 1931, the trial of Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of the political Berlin magazine Die Weltbühne, began in Leipzig. He was accused of "betraying military secrets" - in the worst case, he was threatened with several years in prison.

It had taken more than two years for the proceedings to begin; Obviously, the military, judiciary and politicians saw the situation very differently in the Weimar Republic. On March 12, 1929, the “Weltbühne” published an article entitled “Windy things from German aviation”, in which some open secrets of German armaments were vaguely hinted at.

Of course, anyone who knew anything about the Republic knew that the Reichswehr secretly trained pilots, even though the Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germany to have its own air force. Even for the victorious powers of the First World War, the hints were hardly surprising. As a precaution, Ossietzky deleted the only possibly interesting detail from the manuscript, namely that there was close cooperation with the Soviet Air Force.

It didn't help: after almost six months of closed-door proceedings, the accused was sentenced to 18 months in prison without parole for alleged espionage. Ossietzky found the verdict ridiculous, which it actually was, but nevertheless began serving the sentence in May 1932 – because he was “most uncomfortable being a prisoner”. That suited him.

Born in Hamburg in 1889, he came from a middle-class German-Polish family. Despite his great interest in literature, he failed at secondary school and initially became a law clerk. He was already a pacifist at the age of 19 and soon after began publishing texts as a journalist – often with content critical of the military. Unfit for military service, he still had to go to the western front from 1916 to 1918 as a "reinforcement soldier". It was a kind of "construction soldiers" as later in the GDR.

From 1919 he lived in Berlin and was now able to make a living from his earnings as a journalist. He did not get permanent employment until 1927, when he succeeded the founder Siegfried Jacobsohn, who died unexpectedly, as editor of the “Weltbühne”. Ossietzky formed the paper into a politically left-leaning but always intellectually independent voice in the discourse of the Weimar Republic, in which many important intellectuals wrote.

After 227 days in prison, Ossietzky was released shortly before Christmas 1932. But a good two months later, after the Reichstag fire, he was arrested again by the Prussian police, now led by National Socialists. Unlike in 1932, however, he was not sent to a regular prison, but was handed over to the SA, who severely abused the well-known opponent of Hitler in the "wild concentration camp" Sonnenburg an der Oder.

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After that, Ossietzky was sent to the Esterwegen concentration camp before an international campaign in the run-up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics organized by his wife Maud, who was of British descent, secured his return to Berlin. Ossietzky was now suffering from life-threatening tuberculosis and was from then on treated in a hospital under guard. In November 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize retrospectively for 1935, but he was not allowed to travel to Oslo for the award ceremony.

Still under constant guard, Ossietzky died as a result of his imprisonment in a concentration camp on May 4, 1938 in Berlin. His wife and their daughter were allowed to emigrate to Sweden. Since the 1980s, Carl von Ossietzky has been recognized as one of the most important journalistic opponents of National Socialism, but a retrial for the absurd trial of 1931 failed for purely formal reasons.

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This article was first published in March 2021.

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