In 1932, at the age of 20, Otto Ernst Remer enlisted in the Reichswehr, unknowingly beginning a career that would place him at the center of some of the most pivotal moments of the 20th century. By April 1942, he commanded a battalion in the elite infantry regiment Großdeutschland, nicknamed “Die Feuerwehr,” or “the fire brigade,” for its role as a rapid response unit. On 20th July 1944, he found himself in the middle of a conspiracy that would seal his reputation. A bomb exploded at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg, and in the chaos that followed, conflicting orders were issued.
Major Remer was told by the conspirators to arrest high-ranking Nazi officials in Berlin, but he hesitated. Aided by a well-placed call to Joseph Goebbels, and then to Hitler himself, Remer learned the truth: the Führer was alive. Within a minute, Hitler was on the line, and he gave Remer full authority to crush the conspiracy. That night, Remer’s decisive actions helped end the plot, and Hitler promoted him two ranks to Oberst.
In January 1945, he was elevated to Generalmajor. When the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, Remer managed to avoid capture by Soviet forces and was taken into American custody. During his internment, the American commander of a camp holding German generals reportedly said of him, “Of the 87 German generals in this camp, General Remer is the only one whom I respect as courageous and honorable. ” But his future would reveal a very different kind of loyalty.
In 1949, Remer became a founding member of the Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP), one of the most openly neo-Nazi organizations in post-war West Germany. The party advocated the restoration of a sovereign German Reich, rejected Germany’s integration into Western alliances, and called for the removal of foreign troops from German soil. The Soviets apparently viewed the German Communist Party as ineffectual and preferred to channel resources to Remer’s movement instead. The SRP’s appeal was substantial but limited.
In 1950, the party won nearly 370,000 votes in federal elections, and in 1951, it secured 11 seats in the Lower Saxon state parliament with 11% of the vote. In Bremen, it won 5. 5% of the vote in October 1951. These were alarming numbers for a democracy less than six years old, and they caught the attention of both the West German government and the occupying powers.
Remer’s public call for the assassination of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1952 pushed the government to act. The SRP was banned, and Remer himself was forced to flee. On the run, he found refuge in a chalet belonging to Countess Faber-Castell, an early supporter of the SRP. But his story did not end there.
Remer had also made a name for himself as a Holocaust denier, and in 1951, he publicly called the 20th of July conspirators “traitors to the people. ” This provoked a lawsuit from the widow of Major General Henning von Tresckow, one of the conspirators. The trial that followed in March 1952 became one of the most significant legal proceedings in early West German history. For the first time, a German court had officially designated the Third Reich as an Unrechtsstaat and recognized the 20th of July conspirators as acting in accordance with conscience and duty.
Remer was convicted of defamation and sentenced to three months in prison. Rather than serve his sentence, he went into hiding, this time in Spain, where he was protected by the Franco regime. The German government sought his extradition, but Spain’s High Court refused, ruling that Holocaust denial was not a crime under Spanish law and therefore did not constitute an extraditable offense. Remer did not return to retire quietly.
He rejected Germany’s integration into the European Community and opposed the Western alliance, believing instead that Germany should seek a partnership with Moscow. This brought him into renewed conflict with German law. In 1959, he was sentenced to five years in absentia for incitement and other charges. Yet he remained free in Spain, shielded by Franco’s protection.
The 1950s saw former Nazis reintegrate into society at every level, from local governments to federal ministries to intelligence agencies. The Braunschweig Trial of 1952 represented one attempt to establish moral clarity, but its impact was limited. Remer’s legacy, however, was not just legal or political; it extended into the private lives of his family. Remer married twice and had three children: two sons and a daughter.
His first wife, Anneliese, bore the children, and his second wife, Anneliese’s sister-in-law, became a controversial figure in her own right, reportedly acting as an intermediary between the German government and Arab states. The family lived under a shadow, as Remer’s prominence brought both supporters and enemies to their door. On one side, there were those who saw Remer as a hero and a patriot who had saved Germany from the 1944 plot. On the other, the family lived under the constant scrutiny of German authorities and the disapproval of mainstream society.
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Remer and another former SRP member named Ernst Wilhelm Springer reportedly sold 4,000 pistols to Fidel Castro. Remer later boasted of having met Arafat quite well, naturally. His post-war life was a series of adaptations, each attempt to remain relevant and politically active, all animated by the same refusal to accept the verdict of history. A public opinion survey taken in 1951, before the trial, had revealed that over half of Germans viewed the 20th of July conspiracy negatively, with one-fifth believing Germany had lost the war because of such traitors.
This context helps explain the Riemer family’s choices. The Remer children grew up as the children of one of the most controversial figures in post-war Germany, bearing a name associated with the crushing of the resistance and the survival of the Nazi regime for 10 additional months of war. Whether they followed their father’s path or distanced themselves from his legacy, whether they spoke publicly or retreated into anonymity, remains largely unknown. Unlike the descendants of other prominent Nazi figures who have sometimes emerged to confront or defend their family histories, the Remer children appear to have chosen obscurity.
Remer lived out his final years in Marbella, his health declining, but his views unchanged. He died on 4th October 1997, in Marbella, Spain, at the age of 85. His second wife, Anneliese, continued to live in Marbella until her death in 2003. The story of what happened to Otto Remer’s family after World War II is in many ways the story of what did not happen.
Their silence speaks its own kind of testimony, perhaps of shame, perhaps of continued loyalty, perhaps simply of the desire to live ordinary lives free from the burden of history. The children from his first marriage would now be elderly if still living. Whether they have descendants, whether those descendants know or care about their great-grandfather’s story, whether the Remer name carries any weight in contemporary Germany, are questions the historical record does not answer.
Their obscurity may itself be a final judgment on Remer’s legacy, a quiet acknowledgment that the past is not something one can simply escape, but neither is it something one can easily confront.
