Politically Persecuted Persons in Hamburg, 1933-1945
The multi-media database "Politically Persecuted Persons in Hamburg, 1933-1945" is available at http://www.politisch-verfolgte.de/ (website in German).
This virtual encyclopaedia is a project of the Working Group for Hamburg's History at the Historical Seminar of the University of Hamburg, Department of Social and Economic History, headed by Dr. Holger Martens. The entries were compiled by students in connection with their coursework in 2003 and 2004.
The web site has two user-friendly search functions to retrieve the biographies of persecuted persons and entries to the glossary. Entries can be retrieved either through catchwords or in alphabetical order.
The biographies presented show many different motivations for resistance actions and subsequent political persecution in the Third Reich. There is, for instance, the biography of socialist Heinz Gärtner, who got engaged in the illegal Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) or that of German-Jewish communist Alfred Levy who escaped from Nazi Germany only to be sentenced to death and murdered by the NKVD in 1938, or that of Margaretha Rothe who worked within the resistance group "The White Rose". The selection of biographies offers a wealth of material for historical-political education aiming at a multi-facetted approach to resistance in the Third Reich that goes beyond the usually referred to examples, e.g. of the resistance fighters of 20 July 1944, Georg Elsner or the Scholl siblings. The wide variety of resistance actions and their different motivations provide an important insight into scopes for action that were available to Germans in the Third Reich.
Language and content wise, the entries to the glossary are suitable for the independent research work of students from grade 9 onwards. As they are not restricted to the context of Hamburg, they can also be used for other topics than resistance in the Hamburg region.
