/soy/ - Soyjaks

There’s a famous photograph from 1936 of German dockworkers giving the Hitler salute. If you look closely, you can see that just one person in the entire crowd is not participating. While more than a hundred people extend their hands to the Führer, he stands alone, with his arms crossed.

Who was this man? And where did he find his courage? For years, the photo lay in a dusty archive, until one day a historian stumbled upon it. On 15 November 1995, he placed an appeal in the Hamburger Abendblatt, asking whether there might be anyone who recognized the man. That same week, a reader responded that it had to be her father, August Landmesser.

His story turned out to be heartbreaking. In 1931, as a twenty-one-year-old, August joined the Nazi party, hoping it would get him a job. But then, just a few years later, he met nineteen-year-old Irma Eckler. She was Jewish, and as an Aryan, August was not allowed to get involved with her. Yet the two fell in love. Against all the rules, they even had two daughters, Ingrid and Irene.

There is one photo of the family, from June 1938. We see a smiling father with his eldest daughter, and a young mother holding her baby tightly.

A month after this picture was taken, the Gestapo pounded on the family's door. The children were taken away to an orphanage, and the parents were convicted of 'Rassenschande' ('racial shame'). Mother Irma would eventually be gassed in a concentration camp, while father August had to fight at the front – he was killed in 1944.

More than half a century later, their youngest daughter flicked open a newspaper and saw her father's picture. The image of the dockworker went around the world. August Landmesser ended up on millions of buttons, T-shirts and posters.

After all these years, the-man-who-didn't-salute still seems to stare at us: what would *you* have done in my case? Would you have been just as brave, or would you have joined the crowd?