The way. I put it with 2 Police Officers what a rally that must have bad all of them sitting here at the same time. And you. Know. You can hardly imagine how behaved. You know. I think youre going to see when rick i can actually think in terms of right or wrong here to. Of course i can really only see my father and so im also very anxious in this room. Hes going to of course i know what moved him if he knew he wouldnt get out of this situation and his last thoughts were certainly with his family was so i knew that some good down bones and surely he will hear from me. As for who for me and 5 try to imagine my father that think he was certain he had no way out so i could put all those passion into his own plea because he had nothing to lose. And his statement mr president it is about my life today but tomorrow it will be about yours shows that it must have hit hard and question of perfection from. It was with paris and it. Was. Pretty quiet but i predicted i thought im going to. Make you look. Like theres an. Iceberg. So in the line of wonder when i stand here now i really admire the defendants who stood here and you had the selfcontrol and courage to express things with clarity in their rhetoric and in particular with clarity in their minds in our heightened of a 2 week one for iraq in christ. You know you know it should be here i dont. Believe it will. Be anything i did we did or did. You know what we were going to pay to write. Almost 3000 death sentences were carried out and put some say under the nazi regime. Before her execution erica from blocked off wrote a farewell letter to her little daughter but the letter never reached as i ask you who was later found in the east german archives no one had thought it necessary to actually give it to her it was so for the existence of police i knew nothing of the existence of the letter so not if id received it at the right time lets say as a teenager not as a child maybe it would have been too much for a child but if id got it when i was still young my life we would have been different if for years i was angry and i also felt forsaken. At the meal for less than good food. Sue but thats the way it went i didnt get the letter until 62 years later. Listen volumes let me close and say was and still is and in a spacious place for me. And its also a place of silence and individual encounters. With off on them i havent had any good experiences when ive shared with others. And i dont feel very good about it. I cant actually get my pain across to people. In the death cell and plots and say interests meant was slipped a little book the thoughts of good to schiller and her elderly and sayings from the bible. You heard of i he wrote in it just for me. To be axels baptismal of. Another day he wrote. I can hardly speak now because the lump in my throat is too big what with the. Then in another place he wrote. Only i could see our children again. I was he could to. Thats what he wrote on 8th of september the day of his execution im talk to him please dont. Come to us meant was 31 years old. By the end of the war more than 150 people who were taken part in the july bomb plot had been killed. Its our interest this week its really the most horrible place i know but its the place where i always see my father on the gallows. And i cant get that picture out of my head went into a speech only there was. Every year on july 20th the family members meet for prayers for doctors and the im going to lincoln we family members are basically alone in a protected area and every time is always a renewed experience for me. Because i not only see the hook above me this need. But of course i also see my father hang in there and. Hear from. Her. I am. Super fire in front on our liberation was quite sudden someone knocked on the cellar door and the door opened and in front of us was a negro black as night but. Far you know. Weve never seen a negro with a helmet and a machine gun and a big smile as he looked at us children thought he reached into his pants pocket and gave us some chewing gum and that quickly dispelled our fear. Well done for going on. And then it must have been a week or 2 later when we were all summoned and then this mayor a social democrat who had been released from the concentration camp turned out. He stood on the table and we children were all lined up in front of the table. And he said you can be proud of your fathers they were heroes and we all looked at each other quite moved and then he left and we went back to business as usual. But it didnt really affect us. And what had really happened was not actually discussed as much work on the stuff we were described as advice is to thank you for such a pursuit. The period of do not support cation and reconstruction began. But 1st nobody cared about the resistance fighters. My father survived the prosecutor had asked for the Death Penalty but he avoided execution through luck and the help of friends my father got 3 years in prison for failing to report a crime after the liberation he plunged back into cultural life he collected information about the resistance in 1907 he gave a speech on the anniversary of the burning of the books. This pyar this fiery farce of stupidity was ignited by misguided use it as small a fire on the open plots marked the start of a global conflagration which blew back on us and destroyed these houses around it seem like. Even. My father wanted to bring munford writer to court and he denounced him to the americans in nuremberg who did appear at the nuremberg trials but as a witness not a defendant he had been working for the American Secret Service under the code name othello he gave the americans the gestapo version of the red orchestra a supposedly europe wide network of paid communist agents who were just waiting to become active again under moscows leadership in the cold war that was now beginning rohde became a valuable ally of the west the Public Prosecutor in the book investigated the 40 death sentences he had passed. Come in if. There you can read among other things by a prosecutor who was in actual fact running the investigation into routers activities. He said he had acted relatively humanely given the importance of the case. And in fact a lot more Death Penalty should have been handed down to them and the few. In the end the investigation against month later lowder was shelved he ran a farm near luna borg and campaigned for radical right wing parties. Then because he was so close to the east german border and feared he could be kidnapped he moved to the thomas region the citizens of glass who to elected him deputy mayor for the c. D. U. None of the 3rd rides hanging judges was ever held to account in west germany a generous pension allowed to order to live comfortably until his death in 1971 the families of the resistance fighters had a different tale to tell often they had to fight for years to get their pensions oxus mans mother was one of them written event and the pensions offices were bureaucratic jungle. And you can tell from a little 4 letter to my mother. This one you could tell from the german that the clerk was disgusted at having to write to my mother to leave. It was certainly a terribly unpleasant time for. Israelis fjords of. Virtually no one was removed from the staff of the administration in judiciary in the new federal republic of germany all eyes were on the future you have generated in thoughts like that before we didnt have a complete replacement of the population in germany to mention the same people live there often 8945 years before if thats comfortable and that meant that the resistance fighters were not on it but on the contrary for many years with vilified as traitors as about you and the families as their wives or children of traces of. If the 950. 00 s. Were not a good time for the families that there is a distance vices come for chi and it should set. Public recognition for the victims of july 20th 1904 came slowly the 1st major Memorial Service with president to go to hardees sent chancellor conrad out an hour only took place in 1954. Meanwhile the german democratic republic saw itself as the 1st anti fascist state on german soil it promised to do everything better. I was a pioneering pioneer if you like and of course i later joined the free german he thought that i was asian and was also a candidate for Party Membership but because my father simply refused to talk about my mother it was always a kind of hard core inside me but he doesnt. Really know how to count. The nazis and sentenced as ask his father to 4 years in prison and he survived the war in a penal battalion in the g. D. R. He tried to adapt to the new regime. And scorpio grew up with his grandmother at the beginning of the 1950 s. Street schools and even nurseries were named after his communist parents he became the child of heroes and marks and as an adolescent as an 111213 year old i just couldnt live with that. Those were the times where i lay in bed at night and said man why did you do that. Get us going to hot. Thats me too tired for the what really made me angry was that of like when i was 14 i asked my father about the red orchestra and he said to me weve promised the soviet comrades that in the sort of voice im using now very official we have promised the soviet homewards not to talk about it the struggle is not over a compass that was it formed with. The communists saw the red orchestra as to bush why into ideologically diverse paying too little attention to the moscow line in east germany if you had time for the july plotters either just a bunch of aristocrats and officers who were worried about their farms but suddenly in the mid 1960 s. The red orchestra was honored after all but in the soviet union the east german leadership hurriedly changed its tune. The game because in the pool because you were in for that it was because of the publication of the history of the Labor Movement in which the shields boys in the heart group became the schulze of boys and hard knock organization and thats why the with and then they discovered it also had contacts with moscow. And st important or information from berlin to moscow with the radio my father had sat have. My father is the. Secret police paucity of his milk and had a feature film made. Kael k. To p. T. X. One of the most expensive east german productions ever telling the tale of agents to do the party line. Copy jr did some of the research in moscow. With a gun in my. Yes i wanted to find out which radio messages he sent they surely must have arrived here and so on. But i was told no we dont have any radio messages why are they somewhere else and theres no i was told theres only one radio message from the 23rd or 24th of june 1901. In other words right after the invasion of the soviet union began