Martin Gauger

Martin Gauger

Martin Gauger (August 4, 1905 Elberfeld – July 14, 1941 Pirna) was a German jurist and pacifist from Wuppertal, Rhenish Prussia. He was a member of the Kreisau Circle which sought to overthrow the National Socialist regime in Germany during the Second World War.

He was the fifth of eight children. From 1924-1930 he studied legal science and economics in Tübingen, Kiel, London, Berlin and Breslau. In 1934, as a lawyer in the office of the public prosecutor in München-Gladbach, Gauger refused to take the required oath of allegiance to Hitler and resigned from the civil service. In a subsequent post as legal advisor to the Bekenntniskirche (confessing church) he devoted himself to the resistance movement. On 17. May 1940 he fled to the Netherlands by swimming across the Rhine River. Unfortunately he arrived just as the German Wehrmacht invaded the neutral country. He was wounded and captured, imprisoned till June 1941 in Düsseldorf-Derendorf. On the 12. June he was brought to Buchenwald concentration camp, and then (14.7.1941) to Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre, where he was killed.

References

• Louis L. Snyder (1998), Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, (ISBN 1-85326-684-1)
• Werner Oehme: Märtyrer der evangelischen Christenheit. 1933-1945. Neunundzwanzig Lebensbilder. (in German).Berlin 1979, p. 72-79.