Background
Otto-Ernst Remer was born on 18 October, 1912.
Otto-Ernst Remer was born on 18 October, 1912.
Commander of the crack Guard Battalion Grossdeutschlund stationed near Berlin who was ordered by his superiors to seal off the ministries in the Wilhelmstrasse during the July 1944 plot, the thirty-two-year-old Major Otto Remer's quick turnabout to Hitler's side helped to wreck the conspiracy.
Remer, who had been wounded eight times during the war and received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves from Hitler himself, had been sent to arrest Joseph Goebbels. The Minister of Propaganda reminded him of his oath of loyalty and put him through to Hitler on the telephone to prove that the Führer was not dead as the conspirators had alleged. Remer then withdrew' his battalion from the Wilhelmstrasse, occupied the Kommandantur in Unter den Linden and sought to arrest the ringleaders of the plot. For his role in restoring order in Berlin, Remer was promoted to Major General and divisional Commander. After the war Remer founded the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in 1950, which polled 360,000 votes in the local elections in Lower Saxony a year later. He heaped abuse on the anti-Nazi Resistance, claiming that they were a ‘stain on the shield of honour of the German officers' corps' and had stabbed the German army in the back. He was sentenced in March 1952 to three months’ imprisonment - it was never served since he fled into exile - for collective libel of the Resistance circle. A few months later the SRP was dissolved by the Bonn government.
Remer resurfaced in Egypt, calling for Germans to help create a strong Arab army to fight their oppression by ‘international Jewry’, denouncing reparations to Israel as ‘brutal robbery’ and ranting against ‘the inhuman atrocities’ supposedly committed by the Jews in Palestine.