Passions : Criminal Victim : Concentration camp

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem "First they came ...". The poem exists in many versions; the one featured on the United States Holocaust Memorial reads: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
Niemöller was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and a self-identified antisemite. He became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches. He opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.

Kurt Gerstein (11 August 1905 – 25 July 1945) was a German SS officer and head of technical disinfection services of the Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS (Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS). After witnessing mass murders in the Belzec and Treblinka Nazi extermination camps, Gerstein gave a detailed report to Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, as well as to Swiss diplomats, members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII, and to the Dutch government-in-exile, in an effort to inform the international community about the Holocaust as it was happening. In 1945, following his surrender, he wrote the Gerstein Report covering his experience of the Holocaust. He died of an alleged suicide while in French custody.

Hans Mathiesen Lunding (25 February 1899 – 5 April 1984) was a Danish officer, eventing rider, resistance fighter and director of military intelligence in Denmark.

Maurice Southgate (20 June 1913 – 17 March 1990), code named Hector, was an officer in the Royal Air Force and an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.
Southgate was the organiser (leader) of the SOE's STATIONER network (or circuit) operating in a large area centered on Châteauroux in central France and Tarbes in southern France from 1942 to 1944. He was captured by the SS in Montluçon in 1944 and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp where he survived until its liberation by American forces in 1945. Southgate was regarded by Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE's French Section, as one of his best agents.

Reidar Djupedal (March 22, 1921 – July 29, 1989) was a professor of North Germanic languages and literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Djupedal was born in Oslo. After graduating from the English program at Firda Upper Secondary School in Sandane in 1941, Djupedal studied at the University of Oslo until the fall of 1943. He was arrested on November 30 that year and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp as one of the approximately 650 male students at the University of Oslo interned in German prison camps during the Second World War II from December 1943 to liberation in May 1945 and known as the "German students" (Norwegian: Tysklandsstudentene). He returned home in the spring of 1945 and resumed his studies at the University of Oslo, and in 1950 he received a degree in historical linguistics with a dissertation titled Noko om Ivar Aasen i åra 1840–60 (Ivar Aasen in the Years 1840–1860).In 1950 and 1951 he worked on the Norsk Ordbok (Norwegian Dictionary). From 1951 to 1956 he taught Norwegian at the University of Copenhagen and in Aarhus, and from 1962 to 1969 he taught Nordic linguistics at the University of Bergen. In 1969 he became a professor at the Norwegian College of General Sciences, remaining in this position until he retired in 1988.
Djupedal is especially known for his work on Ivar Aasen; among other things, he published Aasen's letters and diaries in three volumes, and together with Johannes Gjerdåker he also published Aasen's Norske ordsprog (Norwegian Proverbs) and wrote a long afterword for the work. Djupedal's Aasen collection is kept at the Ivar Aasen Documentation Center (Norwegian: Aasentunet) in Ørsta.Djupedal also wrote extensively about Faroese, Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, the literary magazine Dølen, and Norwegian folk tales and poetry. He also worked to give Olea Crøger the attention he thought she deserved in efforts to collect Norwegian folk tales.
Reidar Djupedal was the father of the politician Øystein Djupedal.

Werner Scholem (29 December 1895 – 17 July 1940) was a member of the German Reichstag in 1924 to 1928 and a leading member of the Communist Party of Germany. Scholem and his wife, Emmy, were portrayed in the 2014 documentary "Between Utopia and Counter Revolution".

Jacques Renouvin (6 October 1905 – 24 January 1944) was a royalist militant in France during the Second World War and hero of the French resistance.
Born in Paris, Renouvin studied law and initially became a lawyer. He initially supported Action française, but left after the 6 February 1934 crisis. In November 1938 after the Munich agreement, he garnered attention by publicly slapping Pierre-Étienne Flandin, who had sent a congratulatory telegram to Adolf Hitler. Renouvin was mobilised in 1939, and he was a volunteer for the corps francs. He fought a brilliant campaign, being wounded and taken prisoner. He escaped from the hospital to which he had been brought.
After demobilisation, he moved to the free zone in late 1940, and joined the underground movement Liberté created by a small group of Christian democrat teachers. Specifically responsible for propaganda, he organised youth commandos in pursuit of this. After the merger between Liberté and Les Petites Ailes which gave rise to Combat, Henri Frenay put Renouvin in charge of organising Groupes francs throughout the free zone. This position made him one of the most wanted resistance members by all the police.
Renouvin was arrested on the 29 January 1943 by the Gestapo at Brive-la-Gaillarde railway station, along with Mireille Tronchon whom he had married while in hiding. He was transferred to Fresnes Prison and tortured for several months before being deported to Germany on the 29 August 1943. Interned in Mauthausen concentration camp, he died of exhaustion on 24 January 1944.
He had a son, Bertrand Renouvin, from his marriage to Mireille Tronchon; Bertrand was born on 15 June 1943 while his mother was still being held in La Santé prison.
A 20 centimes postage stamp was issued in 1961 in Renouvin's memory.

Yva (26 January 1900 – disappeared June 1942?; officially declared dead on 31 December 1944) was the professional pseudonym of Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon who was a German Jewish photographer renowned for her dreamlike, multiple exposed images. She became a leading photographer in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
When the Nazi Party came to power, she was forced into working as a radiographer. She was deported by the Gestapo in 1942 and murdered, probably in the Majdanek concentration camp during World War II.