Hildegard Loewy

Hildegard Löwy (b.1922 - 4 March 1943) was a Jewish German office worker who became involved in anti-Nazi resistance. She was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison.

Life Hildegard Löwy was born in Berlin. She grew up with her parents and her younger sister, Eva, at the family home alongside the city's Luitpoldstrasse. Erich Loewy, her father, had participated in the First World War as a frontline soldier and, not withstanding the family's Jewish provenance, could not bring himself to leave Germany with his family despite the progressive intensification of state mandated antisemitism after 1933. A local group leader, Ellen Schwarz, remembered that Löwy had wanted to study Medicine at the University of Jerusalem. The necessary papers were refused her, however, on account of her handicap. The doctor responsible for authorising her admission to the necessary Hakhshara programme rejected her application because "only healthy young people" could be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. A few years earlier it might have been possible for her parents to finance an alternative emigration route for their daughter, but by this time restrictions in Germany on Jewish employment and business opportunities had left them impoverished, and restrictions on the export of currency would in any case have blocked such a move under most circumstances. Germany's Nazi government was not completely without its own somewhat ponderous sense of fun, and the goal of the ironically named Soviet Paradise exhibition, which according to official statistics, was visited by 1.3 million people, was to show "poverty, misery, depravity and need" of the nations in the Soviet Union under Jewish-bolshevik rule and thus to justify the war against the Soviet Union. The arson attack itself took place on 18 May 1942 There is no suggestion that Hildegard Löwy herself had not been involved in the arson attack on the exhibition in the park. She was one of the first to be arrested, was taken to the "Investigatory penitentiary" at Berlin-Moabit.

Although they were living together, few people were more surprised by Löwy's arrest than her partner, Georg Israel (1921–1944). The two had come across one another in 1939 when the school they both attended had been closed down following the Kristallnacht pogrom and they had both transferred to the city's last surviving Hebrew school. They had moved in together shortly after meeting, but for reasons which invite several possible interpretations Löwy had never told her lover about her involvement with the people who organised the arson attack.

She remained in the Moabit penitentiary for nearly half a year before facing trial. Anticipating that she would be condemned to death, on 2 December 1942 she made a desperate escape attempt, knotting sheets together and attaching one end to a window from which she had removed the glass. The attempt, which was complicated by her physical handicap, failed. The knotted sheets were discovered and she was removed to a special "calming down cell" (Beruhigungszelle). Hildegard Löwy's trial took place on 10 December 1942 before the "second senate" of the special "People's Court" which Chancellor Hitler had set up back in 1934 in order for the government to be able to deal with "political offences" without recourse to the traditional justice system. She was among the eleven prisoners to face the court and be found guilty that day. Eight of the eleven, including Hildegard Löwy were condemned to death. The sentence was carried out at the jail on 4 March 1943.