Helmut Ortner – författare

Though little known, the name of the judge Roland Freisler is inextricably linked to the judiciary in Nazi Germany. As well as serving as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, he was the notorious president of the People s Court , a man directly responsible for more than 2,200 death sentences; with almost no exceptions, cases in the People s Court had predetermined guilty verdicts. It was Freisler, for example, who tried three activists of the White Rose resistance movement in February 1943\. Along with Christoph Probst, Sophie and Hans Scholl were arrested for their part in an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign which called for active opposition against the Nazi regime. Found guilty of treason, Freisler sentenced the trio to death by beheading; a sentence carried out the same day by guillotine. In August 1944, Freisler played a central role in the show trials that followed the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 20 July that year a plot known more commonly as Operation Valkyrie. Many of the ringleaders were tried by Freisler in the People s Court . The proceedings were filmed, the intention being to use the images as propaganda in newsreels.Freisler could be seen alternating between clinical interrogations of the defendants through to his yelling of personalized and theatrically enraged abuse at them from the bench. Nearly all of those found guilty were sentenced to death by hanging, the sentences being carried out within two hours of the verdicts being passed. Roland Freisler s mastery of legal texts and dramatic court-room verbal dexterity made him the most feared judge in the Third Reich. In this in-depth examination, Helmut Ortner not only investigates the development and judgments of the Nazi tribunal, but the career of Freisler, a man who was killed in February 1945 during an Allied air raid.

Living as a carpenter who had spent time working in a watch factory, Georg Elser was just an ordinary member of society living in Munich. That is, however, until he took it upon himself to attempt to assassinate the Führer, Adolph Hitler. Being a common man who opposed the Nazi regime, Elser took the skills from his craft and worked to assemble his own bomb detonator. Every night, he snuck out to the Munich Beer Hall, where he worked on assembling the bomb that he planned to use to kill Hitler. Hidden in a hollowed-out space near the speaker’s podium, Elser’s bomb went off successfully, killing eight people. Hitler was not one of them. This is the story, scene by scene, of the events that led up to Georg Elser taking justice into his own hands, his attempt to murder the Führer, and what happened after the bomb went off. The Lone Assassin is a powerfully gripping tale that places the reader in the dark days of Munich in 1939, following Elser from the Munich Beer Hall, across the border, and sadly, to the concentration camp where his heroic life ended.