Rehmer grew up in Neukölln area of Berlin to a working-class family.[3] After school, he did an apprenticeship as a locksmith and worked as an adjuster. At the end of the 1930s, he still took part in excursions and activities of the now-banned Bündische Jugend.
From 1938 to 1940, he successfully attended the Heil'schen Abendschule at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg to prepare for the Abitur and where he met Liane Berkowitz.[4] Afterwards, he was employed there as a substitute teacher because of his outstanding knowledge of geography and history. From joint schoolwork with his fellow pupil Eva Rittmeister, an oppositional discussion circle developed under the guidance of her husband, the psychoanalyst John Rittmeister, to which Rehmer's fiancée Liane Berkowitz also belonged.
On 5 June 1941, Rehmer was conscripted into the German army.[5]
and severely wounded on the Eastern Front with a leg injury. He was therefore unable to take part in his friends' note-taking campaign against the propaganda exhibition "The Soviet Paradise". In connection with the wave of arrests that followed the arrest of Harro Schulze-Boysen, he was arrested in November 1942 in the Britz military hospital and sentenced to death as a member of the Red Orchestra organisation by the 2nd senate of the Reichskriegsgericht on 18 January 1943 and executed on the 13 May 1943 in Plötzensee Prison.[1] Rehmer was heavily incriminated by witness statements accusing him of Wehrkraftzersetzung (sedition) in the military hospital with statements such as "The war is lost" and "Germans will still have to be ashamed of the crimes in the Soviet Union centuries from now".
His fiancée Liane Berkowitz gave birth to their daughter Irina in prison. The child died in October 1943 in a children's home in Eberswalde under unexplained circumstances.[4]
References
^ ab"Friedrich Rehmer". Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand. German Resistance Memorial Center.
^ abTuchel, Tuchel (1993). "Motive und Grundüberzeugungen des Widerstandes der Harnack/Schulze-Boysen-Organisation - Zum Denken und Handeln von Liane Berkowitz". In Schilde, Kurt (ed.). Eva-Maria Buch und die "Rote Kapelle" : Erinnerungen an den Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus (in German) (2nd ed.). Berlin: Overall. pp. 93–107. ISBN9783925961090.