Helmuth Hübener

Helmuth Hübener (8 January 1925 – 27 October 1942) was the youngest opponent of the Third Reich to be sentenced to death by the "Volksgerichtshof" and executed (though a number of younger people were summarily killed by the Nazis).

Life

Helmuth Hübener came from an apolitical family in Hamburg. Like his mother and grandparents, he belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His adoptive father gave him the name Hübener.

Helmuth Hübener was once a Boy Scout, but after the organization was suppressed by the Nazis, he belonged to the Hitler Youth, although he was not always comfortable with its drilling, nor did he find "Kristallnacht" to his liking. When the church congregation to which he belonged undertook to bar Jews from its religious services, Hübener found himself repelled by the new policy.After Hübener finished middle school in 1941, he began an apprenticeship in administration at the Hamburg Social Authority ("Sozialbehörde"). He met other apprentices there, some of them with a communist family background, and they got him listening to enemy radio broadcasts, which was strictly forbidden in Nazi Germany, being considered a form of treason. In the summer of that same year, Hübener began listening to the BBC by himself, and used what he had heard to compose various anti-fascist texts and anti-war leaflets, of which he also made many copies. The leaflets were designed to bring to people's attention how skewed the official reports about World War II from Berlin were, and also to point out Adolf Hitler's, Joseph Goebbels's, and other leading Nazis' criminal behaviour. Other themes covered by Hübener's writings were the war's futility, and Germany's looming defeat. He also mentioned the mistreatment sometimes meted out in the Hitler Youth.

In the autumn of 1941, he managed to involve three of his friends in his unlawful listening, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudolf Wobbe, who were later also co-workers, and later Gerhard Düwer as well. Hübener also had them help him distribute about 60 different pamphlets, all containing material from the British broadcasts, and all consisting of typewritten copies. They distributed them all over Hamburg, using such methods as surreptitiously pinning them on bulletin boards, sticking them through letterboxes, and stuffing them in coat pockets.]

Announced feature film

Matt Whitaker also directed a documentary called "Truth & Conviction", based on the youths' defiance of the Nazi regime. During the editing of "Truth & Conviction" Whitaker began writing a feature film script based on the events. Whitaker partnered with Russ Kendall & Micah Merrill of Kaleidoscope Pictures to produce the film, "Truth & Treason." Veteran actor Max von Sydow was cast first, followed by Haley Joel Osment a couple of months later. Osment is set to play Hübener.Truth & Treason starts filming fall of 2008 in Budapest, Hungary.

ources

*The linked German Wikipedia article
* [http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras/edition_2/geerling.htm Protecting the National Community From Juvenile Delinquency: Nazification of Juvenile Criminal Law in the Third Reich, by Wayne Geerling (Melbourne University)]
*Gedenkstätte Plötzensee (Brigitte Oleschinski, published by the "Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand", and also listed in the German article).
* [http://members.aol.com/baronvanc/swingyox.htm Lights in the Darkness: Resisters of the Nazi Regime — Youth Dissent]
* [http://www.taz.de/pt/2002/10/29/a0218.nf/text Review of Ulrich Sander's book "Jugendwiderstand im Krieg. Die Helmuth-Hübener-Gruppe"]
*
* "The Price: The True Story of a Mormon Who Defied Hitler", by Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, with Alan F. Keele and Douglas F. Tobler. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984. (This book was the first "rough" and considerably shorter version of the later expanded and revised title, "When Truth Was Treason", noted above under "Books, Drama, and Movies.")
* [http://www.truthandtreason.com Truth & Treason Official Web Site]

References