Helmuth Günther Guddat Hübener (8 January 1925 – 27 October 1942) was a German youth who was executed at age 17 by beheading for his opposition to the Nazi regime. He was the youngest person of the German resistance to Nazism to be sentenced to death by the Sondergericht ("special court") People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) and executed.
Life
Helmuth Hübener, born in Hamburg on 8 January 1925, came from an apolitical, religious family in Hamburg, Germany. He belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), as did his mother and grandparents. His adoptive father, Hugo, a Nazi sympathizer, gave him the name Hübener.
Since early childhood, Hübener had been a member of the Boy Scouts, an organization strongly supported by the LDS Church, but in 1935 the National Socialists banned scouting from Germany. He then joined the Hitler Youth, as required by the government, but quit after Kristallnacht in 1938, when the Nazis, including the Hitler Youth, destroyed Jewish businesses and homes.
When one of the leaders in his local congregation undertook to ban Jews from attending its religious services, Hübener found himself at odds with the new policy, but continued to attend services with like-minded friends as the Latter-day Saints locally debated the issue. His friend and fellow resistance fighter Rudolf "Rudi" Wobbe later reported that of the 2,000 Latter-day Saints in the Hamburg area, only seven were pro-Nazi, but five of them happened to be in his and Hübener's St. Georg Branch (congregation), thus stirring controversy with the majority who were non- or anti-Nazis.
After Hübener finished middle school in 1941, he began an apprenticeship in administration at the Hamburg Social Authority (Sozialbehörde). He met other apprentices there, one of whom, Gerhard Düwer, he would later recruit into his resistance movement. At a bathhouse, he met new friends, one of whom had a communist family background and, as a result, he began listening to enemy radio broadcasts. Listening to foreign media was at the time strictly forbidden in Nazi Germany, being considered a form of treason. In the summer of that same year, Hübener discovered his older half-brother Gerhard's shortwave radio in a hallway closet. It had been given to Gerhard earlier that year by a soldier returning from service in France. Helmuth began listening to the BBC on his own, and he used what he heard to compose various anti-National Socialist 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, as well as to point out Adolf Hitler's, Joseph Goebbels', 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 one of his pamphlets, for example, he wrote:
In late 1941, his listening involved three friends: Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudi Wobbe, both of whom were fellow Latter-day Saints, and later Gerhard Düwer. Hübener had them help him distribute about 60 different pamphlets, all containing typewritten material from the British broadcasts. They distributed them throughout Hamburg, using such methods as surreptitiously pinning them on bulletin boards, inserting them into letterboxes, and stuffing them in coat pockets.
Arrest and execution
On 5 February 1942, Hübener was arrested by the Gestapo at his workplace, the Hamburg Social Authority in the Bieberhaus in Hamburg. While trying to translate the pamphlets into French and have them distributed among prisoners of war, he had been noticed by co-worker and Nazi Party member Heinrich Mohn, who denounced him.
On 11 August 1942, aged 17, Hübener was tried as an adult by the Special People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) in Berlin, which had jurisdiction over matters of treason. Hübener was sentenced to death. After the sentence was read, Hübener faced the judges and said: "Now I must die, even though I have committed no crime. So now it's my turn, but your turn will come." He hoped his confrontational tactics would focus the judge's wrath on him and spare his companions.
As stated in the proclamation, 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, which meant the prison guards were allowed to torture and abuse him, and he was not allowed bedding or blankets in his cold cell.