The final letters of a prisoner about to be executed at the end of World War 2

Back when I was much younger I stumbled across an old, dusty book called, “Dying We Live”, edited by Helmut Gollwitzer and published originally in 1956, which published the final letters of imprisoned leftists in Nazi Germany who were about to be executed by the state. I wasn’t very political at the time, but I was interested in the question: what would a person say in their last words to their close family members?

There was one series of letters from a 22 year old seaman in particular that have stuck with me in the years since, especially his final letter to his girlfriend, and I thought it was worth republishing here. The seaman, Kim, and I have very different political beliefs, but one can still be impressed by unusual eloquence and writing talent, especially from someone so young. Life is gray and everyone has good and bad in them¹, and it is the mark of a mature personality that can see and applaud such talent even if one disagrees in other areas.

Here are Kim’s final letters which he had sent to his mother and girlfriend; some short commentary will be provided at the end.

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The press bureau of the chief of the SS and the police force in Denmark on Sunday, April 8, 1945, issued the following announcement:

Condemned to death: Seaman Kim Malthe-Brunn, born July 8, 1923 in Saskatchewan, Canada, resident in Copenhagen, because, as a member of an illegal organization, he possessed himself of a revenue service boat and took it to Sweden. In addition he procured arms for his organization and took part in transporting arms. The death sentence was carried out by a firing squad.

Two days after his Arrest

December 21, 1944

Dear Mother: Conditions here are excellent, and my new life is far better than expected. These are undeniably completely new surroundings and impressions, but undoubtedly contributive to my development…I set in my cell with five others, and discussion runs high about everything under the sun….You must all be perfectly calm now. It probably won’t be too long before I’m home with you again.

A very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Be of good cheer and don’t let the thought of me cloud your joy. I assure you that the hardest thing for me is the thought of you.

Your Kim

(Censored)

January 13, 1945

The Gestapo is made up of very primitive men who have gained considerable skill in outwitting and intimidating feeble spirits; if you observe them a little more closely during one of their interrogations, you will see them displaying a look of violent dissatisfaction, as if they were obliged to muster all their self-control and as if it were an act of mercy on their part not to shoot you down on the spot for not telling them more. But if you look into their eyes, you see that they are enormously satisfied with anything they have succeeded in squeezing out of their victim. The victim himself realizes only much later that he has allowed himself to be led by the nose.

Now listen, in case you should find yourself some day in the hands of traitors or of the Gestapo, look them - and yourself - straight in the eye. The only change that has actually taken place consists of the fact that they are now physically your masters. Otherwise they are still the same dregs of humanity they were before you were captured. Look at them, realize how far beneath you they are, and it will dawn upon you that the utmost that these creatures can achieve is to give you a few bruises and some aching muscles….

You come into a room or a corridor and you have to turn your face to the wall. Don’t stand there trembling at the thought that perhaps now you must due. If you are afraid of death, then you are not old enough to take part in the fight for freedom, certainly not mature enough. If this obsession has power to frighten you, then you are the ideal subject for an interrogation. Suddenly and without cause they slap you. If you are soft enough, then just the humiliation of such a slap is such a shock that the Gestapo wins the upper hand and puts such terror into you that they can have their own way with you.

Confront them calmly, showing neither hatred nor contempt, because both of these goad their overly sensitive vanity far too much. Regard them as human beings and use their vanity against them. [This letter was smuggled out]

Western Prison [No Date]

Nothing is happening to me. I sit here within four walls, behind a locked door, and nothing happens. I keep saying that I live for the day, and I do, but in the same way as the winter seed does. It lies very quiet under its blanket of warm earth; it lies and waits, perhaps it dreams. For the grain, the rich harvest, will not be reaped until after the warm summer.

It is a strange feeling of security that has descended upon me, while I set inside these four infinitely strong walls. For here nothing can happen, everyone knows that, at least nothing surprising, and this induces a certain numbness and lethargy - a state, I imagine, much like that of the winter seed as it lies resting in preparation for coming struggles and deeds.

January 22, 1945

During the last few days I’ve been thinking a good bit about the present-day Pharisees and how much the Bible has been misused, and how well I understand this. Suppose that I am reading in the Bible - I am speaking now of the New Testament - and suddenly, behind a couple of lines, I see Jesus clearly and sharply; then he disappears again behind the flooding wordage of the evangelists. Slowly their ponderous words pile up on top of me. Slaves that we all are, we are numbed by this flattening weight, and we trot along, submitting to it, with the result that it becomes part of us.

Today I was standing on my bunk and looking out of the window, and suddenly it seemed as if all the thoughts that I had recently expressed were returning to me, just like the landscape before me. When I saw it last it was gray and monotonous; there was nothing special that would catch the eye. But today the whole scene lies so radiant in its snow-white covering, with a blue sky sparkling in the cold above it. Suddenly, just as in raising one’s eyes, I saw my old thought in a completely new light. I understood it thus (remember that every season has its garb): the teaching of Jesus should not be something that we follow just because we have been taught to do so and permit ourselves to be influenced on this. We should live not by the letter of his precepts, but rather in conformity with them, complying with a deeply felt inspiration that should come not as an influence from without, but from the heart, from the innermost depths of the soul, as in the case with every inspiration. At this moment there comes to me, as one of the profoundest truths I have learned from Jesus, the perception that one should live solely according to the dictates of one’s soul.

On March 2, after being tortured, Kim was carried back unconscious to his cell. The next day he wrote:

Since then I have been thinking about the strange thing that actually has happened to me. Immediately afterward I experienced an indescribable feeling of relief, an exultant intoxication of victory, a joy so irrational that I was as though paralyzed. It was as if the soul had liberated itself completely from the body, as if soul and body were gambolling like two detached beings, the one in a completely unfettered supernatural ecstasy, the other, severely earthbound, writing in a passionless convulsion. Suddenly I realized how incredibly strong I am. When the soul returned once more to the body, it was as if the jubilation of the whole world had been gathered together here. But the matter ended as it does in the case of so many other opiates: when the intoxication was over, a reaction set in. I became aware that my hands were trembling, that there was a tension within me. It was as if a cell in the depths of my heart had short-circuited and were now very swiftly being discharged. I was like an addict consumed by his addiction. Yet I was calm and spiritually far stronger than ever before.

However, though I am unafraid, though I do not yield ground, my heart beats faster every time someone stops before my door. This must be something purely physical, even though it is indisputably a sense perception that evokes it.

Immediately afterward it dawned upon me that I have now a new understanding of the figure of Jesus. The time of waiting, that is the ordeal. I will warrant that the suffering endured in having a few nails driven through one’s hands, in being crucified, is something purely mechanical that lifts the soul into an ecstasy comparable with nothing else. But the waiting in the garden - that hour drips red with blood.

One other strange thing. I felt absolutely no hatred. Something happened to my body; it was only the body of a boy, and it reacted as such. But my soul was occupied with something completely different. Of course it noticed the little creatures who were there with my body, but it was so filled with itself that it could not closely concern itself with them.

March 27, 1945

Since then I have often thought of Jesus. I can well understand the measureless love he felt for all men, and especially for those who took part in driving nails into his hands. From the moment when he left Gethsemane, he stood high above all passion….

Jesus felt how his whole life was burning itself out of its own fiery force in a last concentration of everything that was strongest in him. Fear is something that comes from within. And if someone tries to instill fear in too great a degree into a man, he may easily succeed in driving out all fear, in projecting his victim into a state in which he stands out of reach of everything and untouchable to anything.

A Letter of Farewell to his Sweetheart, Western Prison, German Section, Cell 411, April 4, 1945

My own little sweetheart: Today I was put on trial and condemned to death. What terrible news for a little girl only twenty years old! I obtained permission to write this farewell letter. And what shall I write now? How shall this, my swan song, sound? The time is short, and there are so many thoughts. What is the final and most precious gift that I can make to you? What do I possess that I can give you in farewell, in order that you may live on, grow, and become an adult, in sorrow and yet with a happy smile?

We sailed upon the wild sea, we met each other in the trustful way of playing children, and we loved each other. We still love each other and we shall continue to do so. But one day a storm tore us asunder; I struck a reef and went down, but you were washed up on another shore, and you will live on in a new world. You are not to forget me, I do not ask that: why should you forget something that is so beautiful? But you must not cling to it. You must live on as gay as ever and doubly happy, for life has given you on your path the most beautiful of all beautiful things. Tear yourself free; let this joy of joys be all for you, let it radiate as the strongest and clearest force in the world, but let it be only one of your golden remembrances; don’t let it blind you and so prevent you from seeing all the glorious things that still lie before you. Don’t give yourself up to melancholy. You must become mature and rich, do you hear, my own dear sweetheart?

You will live on and meet with other marvelous adventures. But promise me one thing - you owe this to me because of everything for which I have lived - promise me that the thought of me will never stand between you and life. Remember that I am in you a reason for being; and if I leave you, that means merely that this reason lives on by itself. It should be a healthy and natural thing, it should not take up too much room, and after a while, when a larger and more important things take its place, it should fade into the background and become nothing more than a small element in a soil full of potential for development and happiness.

You feel a stab at the heart; that is what people call sorrow. But you see, Hanne, we all have to die, and if I have to go a bit sooner or a bit later, neither you nor I can say whether that is good or bad.

I think of Socrates. Read about him - you will find Plato telling about what I am now experiencing. I love you boundlessly, but not more now than I have always loved you. The stab I feel in my heart is nothing. That is simply the way things are, and you must understand this. Something lives and burns within me - love, inspiration, call it what you will, but it is something for which I have not yet found a name. Now I am to die, and I do not know whether I have kindled a little flame in another heart, a flame that will outlive me; nonetheless I am calm, for I have seen and I know that nature is so rich that no one takes note when a few isolated little spouts are crushed underfoot and die. Why then should I despair, when I see all the wealth that lives on?

Lift up your head, you my heart’s most precious core, lift up your head and look about you. The sea is still blue - the sea that I have loved so much, the sea that has enveloped both of us. Live on now for the two of us. I am gone and far away, and what remains is not a memory that should turn you into a woman like N.N., but a memory that should make you into a woman who is alive and warmhearted, mature and happy. You must not bury yourself in sorrow, for you would become arrested, sunk in a worship of me and yourself, and you would lose what I have loved most in your, your womanliness. Remember, and I swear to you that it is true, that every sorrow turns into happiness - but very few people will in retrospect admit this to themselves. They wrap themselves in their sorrow, and habit leads them to believe that it continues to be sorrow, and they go on wrapping themselves up in it. The truth is that after sorrow comes a maturation, and after maturation comes fruit.

One of these days, Hanne, you will meet a man who will become your husband. Will the thought of me disturb you then? Will you perhaps then have a faint feeling that you are being disloyal to me or to what is pure and holy to you? Lift up your head, Hanne, lift up your head once again and look into my laughing blue eyes, and you will understand that the only way in which you can be disloyal to me would be in not completely following your natural instinct. You will see this man and you will let your heart go out to him - not to numb the pain, but because you love him with all your heart. You will become very, very happy because you will have found a soil in which feelings still unknown to you will come to rich growth.

You must greet Nitte for me. I have had it much in mind to write to her, but don’t know whether I’ll still have time. I seem to feel that I can do more for you, and you are after all the essence of all living life for me. I should like to breathe into you all the life that is in me, so that thereby it could perpetuate itself and as little as possible of it be lost. That is willy-nilly what my nature demands.

Yours, but not forever,

Kim

Farewell Letter to his Mother, Western Prison, German Section, Cell 411, April 4, 1945

Dear Mother: Today, together with Jorgen, Nils, and Ludwig, I was arraigned before a military tribunal. We were condemned to death. I know that you are a courageous woman, and that you will bear this, but, hear me, it is not enough to bear it, you must also understand it. I am an insignificant thing, and my person will soon be forgotten, but the thought, the life, the inspiration that filled me will live on. You will meet them everywhere - in the trees at springtime, in people who cross your path, in a loving little smile. You will encounter that something which perhaps had value in me, you will cherish it, and you will not forget me. And so I shall have a chance to grow, to become large and mature. I shall be living with all of you whose hearts I once filled. And you will all live on, knowing that I have preceded you, and not, as perhaps you thought at first, dropped out behind you. You know what my dearest wish has always been, and what I hoped to become. Follow me, my dear mother, on my path, and do not stop before the end, but linger with some of the matters belonging to the last space of time allotted to me, and you will find something that may be of value both to my sweetheart and to you, my mother.

I travelled a road that I have never regretted. I have never evaded the dictate of my heart, and now things seem to fall into place. I am not old, I should not be dying, yet it seems so natural to me, so simple. It is only the abrupt manner of it that frightens us at first. The time is short, I cannot properly explain it, but my soul is perfectly at rest….

When I come right down to it, how strange it is to be sitting here and writing this testament. Every word must stand, it can never be amended, erased, or changed. I have so many thoughts. Jorgen is sitting here before me writing his two-year-old daughter a letter for her confirmation. A document for life. He and I have lived together, and now we die together, two comrades….

I see the course that things are taking in our country, and I know that grandfather will prove to have been right, but remember - and all of you must remember this - that your dream must not be to return to the time before the war, but that all of you, young and old, should create conditions that are not arbitrary but that will bring to realization a genuinely human ideal, something that every person will see and feel to be an ideal for all of us. That is the great gift for which our country thirsts - something for which every humble peasant boy can yearn, and which he can joyously feel himself to have a part in and be working for.

Finally, there is the girl whom I call mine. Make her realize that the stars still shine and that I have been only a milestone on her road. Help her on: she can still become very happy.

In haste - your eldest child and only son,

Kim

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A couple of points to note:

• These letters were written toward the very end of World War 2 when the Germans were losing badly; they were being carpet-bombed an extreme amount and breakdowns were occurring everywhere. For Nazi guards to take the letters of this man while bombs were falling overhead and Allied troops were approaching from all sides and mail it and make sure it got to the addressee speaks to the incredible efficiency of the German system.

• This seaman was executed on April 4, 1945, while the war ended on April 8 or 9 — quite bad luck for Kim to have made it almost right to the end.

• Why is it that people with hyphenated last names are always very liberal? I have not come across a single exception to this generalization.

• I wonder what effects seeing the modern world with the extreme degeneracy and horrors that have occurred to the natural world, the complete implosion of western civilization would have had on this man, who was a religious Christian [and correctly fighting, from that standpoint, for Christian values; he had not transvalued them] if he were here to see it.

• The letters were written by a simple seaman; reading it one is struck by an acute feeling how massively average IQs have fallen in the western world in just a couple of generations — based on this letter it feels like 30 points or more.

• Lastly and strangely, while conducting research for this post it looks like this simple seaman has his own wikipedia page, which is unnerving. Does this speak to the relative rarity of Nazi executions that they received such individualized, special attention by our globohomo overlords? Also see here. The Soviets executed countless people in the gulags, millions over the years; this one peasant who grew up as a farmhand is executed and gets a state funeral and a movie about him, as well as a wikipedia page? It’s quite odd.

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1. As Solzhenitsyn stated in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.”