Passions : Criminal Perpetrator : Executed

Adolf Reichwein (3 October 1898 – 20 October 1944) was a German educator, economist, and cultural policymaker for the SPD, who resisted the policies of Nazi Germany.

Wilhelm Leuschner (15 June 1890, in Bayreuth, Bavaria – 29 September 1944, in Berlin-Plötzensee) was a trade unionist and Social Democratic politician. An early opponent of Nazism, he organized underground resistance in the labour movement. As a result of involvement with the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944, Leuschner was executed.

Wolf-Heinrich Julius Otto Bernhard Fritz Hermann Ferdinand Graf von Helldorff (14 October 1896 – 15 August 1944) was an SA-Obergruppenführer, German police official and politician. He served as a member of the Landtag of Prussia during the Weimar Republic, as a member of the Reichstag for the Nazi Party from 1933, and as Ordnungspolizei Police President in Potsdam and in Berlin. From 1938 he became involved with the anti-Nazi resistance, and was executed in 1944 for his role in the 20th July plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler's regime.

Ernst Wolf Alexander Oskar Harnack (15 July 1888 – 5 March 1945), granted the title von Harnack in 1914, was an official of the Prussian provincial government, a German politician, and a German Resistance fighter. He was arrested, tried and executed in March 1945 at Plötzensee Prison for political opposition to the Nazi Party.

The Dominici affair was the criminal investigation into the murder of three Britons in France. During the night of 4/5 August 1952, Sir Jack Drummond, a 61-year-old scientist; his 44-year-old wife Anne (née Wilbraham); and their 10-year-old daughter Elizabeth were murdered next to their car, a green Hillman, with registration NNK 686 which was parked in a lay-by near La Grand'Terre, the farm belonging to the Dominici family, located near the village of Lurs in the département of Basses-Alpes (now Alpes-de-Haute-Provence). Gaston Dominici was convicted of the three murders in 1957 and sentenced to death. In 1957, President René Coty commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and on 14 July 1960, President Charles de Gaulle ordered Dominici's release on humanitarian grounds due to his poor health. Dominici was never pardoned or given a re-trial and died on 4 April 1965.
The case was discussed by the literary theorist Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies. Barthes argues that Dominici was denied a fair trial because the rural dialect in which he spoke was incomprehensible to the judges, resulting in a verdict based on preconceptions and speculation; such an unfair judgment, in which the accused is condemned due to the incompatibility of their own language with that of their accuser, is identified by Barthes as an omnipresent risk.The trial was the basis of the 1973 film The Dominici Affair directed by Claude Bernard-Aubert and starring Jean Gabin and Gérard Depardieu.