Really annoyed with myself for forgetting the actual anniversary was yesterday, but thinking of these two today

Otto & Elise Hampel (21.6.1897-8.4.1943 & 27.10.1903-8.4.1943) lived in Amsterdamer Straße, Wedding.

After the death of Elise's brother on the western front in 1940 they anonymously distributed hundreds of hand-written postcards with anti-Nazi messages in the stairwells and letterboxes of apartment buildings in working class neighbourhoods of Berlin

They were denounced by someone who saw them posting messages in Schöneberg in September 1942, and arrested a month later. They were both hanged in Plötzensee prison, Wedding, on 8th April 1943

'German people wake up! We must free ourselves from hitlerism!'

'"Victory at any price". So dictates this hitler gang. Every one must sacrifice his life.'

'the hitler war is the workers' death! come what may, no peace with the diabolical hitler regime! the shameful 9 year nazi system must and will be pulled down by decent germans.'

The Hampels' story is reasonably well-known. There's a plaque on the mid-twentieth century apartment building that stands where their old apartment building was on Amsterdamer Straße 10. The square outside Rathaus Wedding is called Otto & Elise Hampel Platz.

Their story was fictionalised by Hans Fallada in his novel 'Jeder stirbt für sich allein' in 1947, translated in English as 'Every Man Dies Alone' or 'Alone in Berlin'

But despite being well-known in this sense, neither of the two(ish?) main traditions of German anti-Nazism claim the Hampels. As an otherwise totally ordinary working class couple, they aren't part of the (mostly fictional) 'honourable' German elite resistance

(see this thread ) https://twitter.com/HistoryNed/status/1129289210593206273

but nor were they part of the main actual resistance movement, the organised far left / Rote Kapelle (who had active members very nearby in Wedding, among other Berlin neighbourhoods)