Martin Gauger

Martin Gauger (August 4, 1905 – July 14, 1941) 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.

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. In 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. Captured, he was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, and then to Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre, where he died.

References

• Louis L. Snyder (1998), Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, (ISBN 1-85326-684-1)