Elfriede Scholz's words during Nazi Germany cost her her life. After criticising the war, calling German soldiers "cattle for slaughter" and wishing for Adolf Hitler's death, she was sentenced to death and executed by the Nazi regime.
An exhibition in Berlin organised by the German Resistance Memorial Foundation aims to honour the legacy of women who, like Scholz, were persecuted by Nazi justice for their resistance.
The mural of portraits on display commemorates 250 women who risked their lives to challenge Nazism and fought for freedom through various actions.
These included providing food and coupons to Jews and communists, falsifying documents, raising funds for the Jewish community, writing articles critical of the Nazi regime, distributing subversive propaganda, hiding Jews and, in some cases, active participation in combat or intelligence groups.
The exhibition, made up of photographs, documents and explanatory texts, highlights the story of 32 women, presented as examples in 23 thematic units that show the full social breadth and ideological diversity of the resistance against the Nazi regime.
A cry of female resistance
All of the women featured in the exhibition took advantage of the opportunities that still existed under the conditions of the dictatorship for compassion and political action.
Hilde Meisel (alias Hilda Monte), for example, used BBC radio to denounce the injustices of Nazism and developed concrete concepts for a European federal community with the aim of ensuring peace in Europe after the war.
For this reason, she was arrested at the border with Liechtenstein in April 1945 and shot when she tried to escape.
As part of the project “Women in the Resistance against National Socialism”, a team of five researchers led by Professor Johannes Tuchel has been investigating the names of thousands of women who resisted National Socialism in the Third Reich and in exile over the past four years, including Hildegard Loewy.
Loewy is one of the youngest women on the researchers' roster.
Failing to complete her studies due to anti-Semitic regulations, she became active against Nazi anti-Semitic policies and the war, taking part in leafleting campaigns, offering her flat for secret meetings and supporting the actions of the Communist-Zionist resistance group.
"If we Jews were ever to be given a place as equal citizens again, it could only happen if a different form of government were given the floor in Germany," Loewy said during interrogation by the Gestapo (secret state police) on July 20, 1942.
On 10 December of the same year, the 20-year-old was sentenced to death by the people's court and murdered in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison on 4 March 1943.
A fight against Hitler and Franco
Irma Götze, a childminder, was involved in the production of banned documents, participated in the Leipzig youth resistance movement and on courier trips to Czechoslovakia.
In 1936, at just 24 years old, the member of the anarcho-syndicalist Free Labor Union of Germany (FAUD) fled to Barcelona and participated in the Spanish Civil War, where she helped care for the wounded and build barricades.
After being imprisoned in Spain by the Soviet secret police GPU, she emigrated to France and fell into the hands of the Gestapo. In November 1942 the Higher Regional Court in Dresden sentenced her to two and a half years in prison.
During the death marches of 1945 he managed to escape. EFE and Aurora
That a genocidal country prepares this exhibition, if it were not for the tragedy of these women, would seem like a joke in bad taste. On the contrary, the Germans enjoy this.