Mormon youth a hero of WWII

This is the story of a Mormon youth and hero who defied the NAzi Regime. The wikpedia article is accurate.to my knowledge. His name was Helmuth Hubener.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_H%C3%BCbener
I give you his story

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.


Helmuth Hübener, flanked by Rudolf Wobbe (left) and Karl-Heinz SchnibbeAfter 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.[1]

On February 5, 1942, Helmuth Hübener was arrested by the Gestapo at his workplace at the Hamburger Bieberhaus. While trying to translate the pamphlets into French, and trying to have them distributed among prisoners of war, he had been noticed by a Nazi Party member, Heinrich Mohn, who had denounced him. (Mohn was jailed after the war, but freed by the Bundesgerichtshof by the early 1950s).

On 11 August 1942, Hübener's case was tried at the Volksgerichtshof in Berlin, and on 27 October, at the age of 17, he was beheaded by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.[1] His two friends, Schnibbe and Wobbe, who had also been arrested, were given lengthy prison sentences of five and ten years respectively.


Volksgerichtshof's proclamation from 27 October 1942 announcing Hübener's executionAs it says in the proclamation (at right), Hübener was found guilty of conspiracy to commit high treason and treasonous furthering of the enemy's cause. He was sentenced not only to death, but also to permanent loss of his civil rights.

It was highly unusual, even for the Nazis, to try an underaged defendant, much less sentence him to death, but the court stated that Hübener had shown more than average intelligence for a boy his age. This, along with his general and political knowledge, and his behaviour before the court, made Hübener, in the court's eyes, a boy with a far more developed mind than was usually to be found in someone of his age. For this reason, the court stated, Hübener was to be punished as an adult.

Hübener's lawyers and his mother appealed for clemency in his case, hoping to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The Berlin Gestapo did as well. In their eyes, the fact that Hübener had confessed fully and shown himself to be still morally uncorrupted were points in Hübener's favour. The Reich Youth Leadership (Reichsjugendführung) would have none of it, however. They said that the danger posed by Hübener's activities to the German people's war effort made the death penalty necessary. On 27 October 1942, the Nazi Ministry of Justice upheld the Volksgerichtshof's verdict. Hübener was only told of the Ministry's decision at 1:05 p.m. on the scheduled day of execution and beheaded at 8:13 p.m.

A youth centre and a pathway in Hamburg are nowadays named for Helmuth Hübener. The latter runs between Greifswalder Straße and Kirchenweg in Sankt Georg. At the former Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, an exhibit about young Helmuth Hübener's resistance, trial, and execution is located in the former guillotine chamber, where floral tributes are often placed in memory of Hübener and others put to death by the Nazis there.

Hübener was arrested by German authorities and two days later was excommunicated by local authorities of the LDS Church. When the Church leadership in the U.S. were informed of the excommunication, they revoked it. Hübener was posthumously reinstated in the LDS Church in 1946, with the note "excommunicated by mistake,"[2] because the specific process required for excommunication from the LDS Church was not followed by Hübener's local church leaders at the time.

His arrest was in connection to his political and anti-Nazi activities. Because of some of the local church leaders' political actions at the time of his excommunication it is most often seen as the reason why he was excommunicated. Some branch leaders allowed political broadcasts during some church meetings and refused to allow Jews to attend meetings. This was done to show that members were good German citizens. One of Hübener's local church leaders, Otto Berndt, was sympathetic to Hübener, and was suspected of having assisted and encouraged the boy. Berndt was questioned and released with an ominous warning: "after Jews, Mormons will be next."

Hübener's story has been the subject of various literary, dramatic, and cinematic works. In 1969, German author Günter Grass wrote the book Örtlich betäubt ("Local anesthetic"), later translated into English, about the Hübener group.[4]

Brigham Young University professor Thomas Rogers wrote a play titled "Hübener," which has had several runs in various venues. Schnibbe attended some of the performances on the BYU campus.

Hübener's story was also documented in the 2003 movie, Truth & Conviction, written and directed by Rick McFarland and Matt Whitaker. The movie, later released on DVD, was sponsored by the BYU College of Humanities.[5]

The book Hübener vs. Hitler; A Biography of Helmuth Hübener, Mormon Teenage Resistance Leader, by Richard Lloyd Dewey, was published by Stratford Books, Provo, UT/Arlington, VA in December 2003, Revised 2nd edition published October 2004. It is a biography written in a popular-historical style, and includes interviews with friends and relatives of Hübener, and utilizes primary documents from the Nazi regime that investigated his case.

When Truth Was Treason is a first-hand account by Karl Schnibbe (Hübener's co-resistance fighter), with editing by Blair R. Holmes, a professional historian, and Alan F. Keele, a German-language specialist. This monograph was published in 1995 by University of Illinois Press, with new publishing rights, theatrical rights, and copyright transferred 2003 to Academic Research Foundation.

The Boy Who Dared, by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, a historical biography for middle school readers that is based on Hübener's life, was published in February 2008. Bartoletti's earlier Newbery Honor book, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow (2005), covers Hübener's story as well.[6]

Truth & Treason is a major motion picture based on the Hübener Group. Filming begins in Budapest, Hungary Spring / Summer 2009. Haley Joel Osment has been cast as Helmuth Hübener. The script is by Ethan Vincent and Matt Whitaker who is also the director. The film is being produced by Russ Kendall & Micah Merrill of Kaleidoscope Pictures along with Whitaker.