Elfriede Scholz

Elfriede Remark was born five years after her brother, Erich Maria Remarque. She was the youngest of four children of the bookbinder Peter Franz Remark (1867-1954) and Anna Maria Remark, née Stallknecht (1871-1917). As a child she was often sick. She was paralyzed for two years due to a lack of red blood cells and weak bones.  Nevertheless, she completed an apprenticeship as a tailor. An illegitimate daughter born in 1923 died of heart failure after a few months.  She finally came to Dresden, where she settled in 1929 as an independent master dressmaker. In 1941 she married the musician Heinz Scholz, who was serving in the Navy .

Like her brother, she was a staunch opponent of the National Socialists. A statement to a customer that the war was lost after all led to her arrest after being denounced and reported to the Gestapo by Captain Hans-Jürgen Rietzel for "subversive statements".  In October 1943, she was sentenced to death before the People's Court in Berlin presided over by Roland Freisler for "undermining military strength". In his judgment, Freisler should explicitly refer to their pacifist brother and exclaimed during the trial: "Your brother has escaped from us, you will not escape from us."[1]

The sentence was carried out on 16 December 1943 in the execution site of the Berlin-Plötzensee prison by beheading with a guillotine .[2][3][4][5][6]

News of her death of his sister, with whom contact had been broken, prompted her brother Erich Maria Remarque to deal with National Socialism in his work. The novel The Spark of Life (1952) was dedicated to his sister. He only found out about her death on 11 June 1946.[1][7]

A Stolperstein for Elfriede Scholz was placed in Dresden.