Contacts with the Resistance

Martin Gauger was in contact with numerous figures of the resistance. His brother Siegfried (1902–1981) and Harald Poelchau (1903–1972), a pastor in Berlin, introduced him to the Social Democratic jurist Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975) in 1934.

With Fraenkel, Gauger intensely discussed issues of criminal and constitutional law, such as the defense of victims of political persecution, but above all the Nazi state as a dual state undermining the rule of the law by the Gestapo’s arbitrary measures. Gauger purportedly also helped Fraenkel obtain forged papers.

Gauger supplied Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, a friend from his days as a student in Breslau, with internal information on Church policy in 1935. He passed it along to English Church circles. Carl Dietrich von Trotha (1907–1952), a cousin of Moltke’s and one of the founders of des Kreisau Circle, knew Gauger from their participation in the “Second Silesian Labor Camp for Workers, Farmers and Students” in March of 1929. In anticipation of the Kreisau Circle, the friends discussed future prospects with Horst von Einsiedeln (1905–1947) in October of 1939.

From 1938 onward, Gauger maintained contact with philosopher Wilhelm Weischedel (1905–1975), a friend from school in Elberfeld and an opponent of the regime.