Forgotten fates | Book presentation and discussion

With the author and former judge Dagmar Scholz and Tor Jan Ropeid (University of Bergen, Emeritus)

„This book takes its starting point in a class reunion. … What starts out as harmless curiosity opens the door to a dark past. It turns out that two pupils, Paul Winzen and Heinrich Lampe, and their friends resisted the Nazi regime. Dagmar Scholz uncovers how the Nazi terror system itself documented its misdeeds. In this way, the book becomes something more than a description of a group of young people and their attempt to think independently.“
Tor Jan Ropeid (Foreword)

While preparing a class reunion for the 50th anniversary of her high school graduation, former judge Dagmar Scholz comes across the names of two students from the first class of 1926 at her old school and learns that both were members of a resistance group during the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. Shocked by the fact that the names and fates of the two pupils were never discussed during their school days in the 1960s, the author sets out in search of clues. She begins with old school files and finally comes across the old criminal case files, which reveal in a shocking way the callous businesslike behaviour and brutality with which the Gestapo and the Nazi justice system destroyed the lives of these young people and many of their friends.

The old case files also reveal the identity of the person who betrayed and spied on the group on behalf of the Gestapo. Old files reveal the fate of this traitor as well as that of the Gestapo officer who persecuted the group and handed them over to Nazi injustice.

The search for clues finally ends in Norway, at the Gestapo Museum in Bergen.

About the author Dagmar Scholz

Dagmar Scholz graduated from the Friedrich Harkort School in Herdecke, where her search for clues began years later. After studying law at the Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster and completing her legal clerkship at the regional court there, she worked for 35 years as a judge at various courts in North Rhine-Westphalia, most recently for 28 years at Dortmund Regional Court.

About Tor Jan Ropeid (Norway, University of Bergen, Emeritus)

Tor Jan Ropeid is Applied Professor Emeritus at the University of Bergen (Faculty of Humanities, Department of Foreign Languages) and Director of the Gestapo Museum Association in Bergen (Norway). He is one of the best experts on the history of the Nazi German occupation in Norway and has contributed significantly to the establishment of the Gestapo Museum in Bergen.

Dagmar Scholz, Forgotten Fates. Resistance against the Nazi regime in Dortmund. Fritz Bauer Library, Volume 7, Bochum: BUXUS EDITION 2024, 168 pages (ISBN 978-3-949379-16-1).