Liselotte Herrmann

Liselotte Herrmann (called "Lilo", 23 June 1909 – 20 June 1938, executed) was a German Communist resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Herrmann was the first woman to be sentenced to death by a Nazi court and then executed in Plötzensee Prison in 1938.

Life

Born in Berlin, Liselotte Herrmann had a middle class liberal upbringing. Her father, Richard Hermann was an engineer who had to move several times for his job. In 1929 she completing her Abitur exams. Her essay was on Friedrich Hebbel's tradegy, "Herodes and Mariamne". After high school she initially planned to become a painter due the influence of Käthe Kollwitz but her father was against it and persuaded her to become a chemist instead. So she went to work as a laboratory assistant in a chemical factory to prepare her studies in chemistry. Later that year, her family moved to Stuttgart, where she attended the Technical College to study chemistry. As a schoolgirl, she was influenced by socialist ideas in Frankfurt and eventually joined the Socialist Schoolchildren's League (SSB) and the Young Communist League of Germany in 1928, and also became a member of the Red Students’ League (Roter Studentenbund). On 7 September 1930, she was fined 30 Reichsmarks for distributing "communist leaflets" in Esslingen during International Youth Camp, after refusing to hand them to the police. She then joined the Revolutionary Union Opposition (Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition) in 1931, and in the same year became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Stuttgart.

In 1931, she moved to Berlin to study biology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In Berlin, she became actively involved in volunteering with the KPD and began her political education by attending classes at the Marxist Workers' School.