Picking the wrong heroes

“Are you General Remer?” demanded Rudolf Heiland, the Elected Member of Nordrheinwestfalia to Baron von Rechenberg. The Baron had come under suspicion just because he was seated next to economist Adolf von Thaddem in the restaurant. “If you had been him…” he said, shaking his fist.

“You’re General Remer!” This time President Koehler thought he’d got the right man. Another mistake. This time it was NS Professor Gerhard Kruger that he’d savaged.

Fritz Doris was surrounded by officer grey. The real Remer was already sitting in the cinema. His visit to the Bundeshaus had lasted an hour.

The first to recognise him had been Irmfried Wechmar, Bonn correspondent of the south German Heimatzeitung. The former colonel in Rommel's Afrika Korps thought he should inform the president and quickly sent a note to President Koehler's chair: "General Remer is in the Bundeshaus. I feel it’s my duty to bring it to your attention".

Koehler left his throne, determined to preserve the dignity of the House and order the ‘Preventer of the 20 July’ to leave the premises. Instead, he found only the stage manager, Dr. Fritz Doris, independent MP and founder of the Socialist Reich Party.

Doris was expectedly stubborn:
“Since when does one person’s rights differ from another’s? My candidate is in possession of all his civil liberties. You cannot eject him from the house”

A reference to "possible repercussions" made little impression on Dorls and anyway, Remer was in a hurry to return to Varel, where there were "piles of letters from all parts of Germany" waiting for him.

The open-hearted Fritz Doris was happy to explain to his Bundeshaus colleagues why Remer was such a good propaganda horse.
“Of course Remer knows nothing about politics but he’s a decent chap. The others thet I associated with, Dr. Krause and Göbel, were nothing but cardboard.

If I put up a poster saying “Dr. Fritz Doris to Speak”, then nobody would come. If I write “Major General and Recipient of Knight’s Cross with Oakleaves, Otto Ernst Remer, Preventer of 20th July to Speak”, then everyone comes. They come out of curiosity, out of hatred or just because they want to. Remer can talk nonsense for half an hour, I don’t care. Afterwards I come along and by the time I’ve finished with them the audience is romping with enthusiasm. That’s how it’s done. Anything else is nonsense.

And that’s how Fritz Doris does it. When this right-wing breakaway whip travels from town to town and from meeting to meeting, he beguiles his deputies with tittle-tattle from Bonn.

He jumps from poisonous commentary on domestic policy to foreign policy. He rails, talks himself hoarse, rolls his eyes, foams at the mouth and pulls at the stringy gray hair of his head, to show his audience where a Soviet bomb fragment failed to pierce his skull

Remer is a willing follower. Godesberg was the first place where the last commander of the Fuhrer Begleitbridage was paraded but Remer refused to sign his name to the cause of an independent German people. Not because he was against the idea, but because he wanted to see, in addition to his own signature, that of a resistance-sized group. There was none. Remer went back to Varel

It was there that Kruger, Ostau and Dorls approached him again in the autumn of 1947. Remer was now a bricklayer apprentice with the construction company Menken after his release from an American POW camp. He was living in a first floor apartment at No.3 Lohstr in Varel. It seemed the construction industry offered the best future. "There is no shame in hard work" he said. "I'm not going to the dogs." After one and a half years of apprenticeship, he became an journeyman bricklayer.

As it happened, politics had already reached its tentacles out to him and Remer weighed in with his “old swing of attack”. It was this same “old swing of attack” that the 1.88m, thin, black haired son of a Justice Inspector had used to make history on 20th July 1944.

Volumes have already been written about the role played by the nine-times wounded Knights Cross with Oak Leaves decorated Major and Commander of the Berlin Wachregiment on the day that Hitler gave him unlimited authority to stop the already failed plot. It’s clear that a man like Remer could not do otherwise, however he seems unconcerned as to the historical importance of his actions.

“I have nothing to hide and I still believe today that my impartial behavior was what any other responsible troop leader would have done”.

On the shabby sofa of his humble two-room refugee apartment his voice turns hard, as if he was still in front of his Grossdeutschland officers, against those people that choose to criticise the catastrophic results of his actions. He confesses: "As a soldier, if I had been ordered to shoot the men in the Bendler-Block, I would have done it."

Political slogans obsess Remer: “Leadership belongs to the front generation” comes from his lips as if he were still wearing his steel helmet. “Through the fire of this war, the German people are destined to save and to lead Europe. All others are degenerate and effeminate, however our experience has made us hard. We alone are able to resist the East”. Hitler’s theory of the Germans as chosen people.

Since sharing a cell in Nuremberg with Baldur von Schirach and being deeply disappointed by his “miserable performance” before the military judges, he has also decided to become a youth worker. “I’ll probably become a scout leader, in order to turn these young folk into proper tough guys”. Military sport is part of his program.