August Landmesser

August Landmesser was a German shipyard worker who joined the Nazi Party in 1931, hoping for work. In 1935 he became engaged to Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman, and was expelled from the party. The couple tried to marry in Hamburg, but the Nuremberg Laws, passed a month later, forbade it. Their daughter Ingrid was born that October. A photograph from the launch of a ship at the Blohm+Voss yard in June 1936 shows a man in the crowd with his arms folded while everyone else salutes. Family members have long identified him as Landmesser, but this is not certain, and another family claims the man is someone else.

In 1937 he was arrested while trying to leave for Denmark and charged with racial disgrace, a crime created by the Nuremberg Laws. He was acquitted for lack of evidence in May 1938 but warned. In July 1938 he was arrested again and sentenced to two and a half years in the Börgermoor camp. Eckler was held by the Gestapo and later sent to Ravensbrück. She is believed to have been murdered in 1942. Landmesser was drafted into a penal battalion in 1944 and declared killed in action in October that year. In 1951 the city of Hamburg retroactively recognised his marriage.