Else Himmelheber

Else Himmelheber (30 January 1905 – 30 November 1944) was a German resistance activist during the Nazi years. She was executed (shot) at the Dachau concentration camp on 30 November 1944.

Life She came from a working-class family. She was born in Ostheim, an inner city quarter on the eastern side of Stuttgart. In 1911 the family of six moved into a two-room apartment at Adlerstr. 24 in Heslach, another inner city quarter of Stuttgart.

Heinrich Himmler was a Nazi with an exceptionally wide palette of senior government jobs including many normally associated with an Interior Minister or Home Secretary. Once each year he visited the women's concentration camp and amnestied a few of the inmates. Their relationship developed and by the early summer of 1944 Himmelheber and Schlotterbeck were engaged to be married. What Himmelheber and Schlotterbeck did not know when they were rediscovered by Nesper in January 1944 was that a few days earlier Nesper had been discovered in possession of an illegal radio device. Faced with the choice between rapid transfer to a concentration camp and working for the Gestapo, Nesper had chosen the Gestapo, and it was at their direction that he had sought out the others, overcome their initial suspicions of him: together they had built up a cell of communist activists in their Stuttgart suburb. Nesper betrayed the resistance group to the Gestapo, and though precise details of who knew what when are unclear, it appears that at the end of May 1944, with Himmelheber and Schlotterbeck making final preparations for their wedding early the next month, Nesper told them that they were about to be arrested.