With the German Reich regaining its ability to act, the question of the determination of the national symbols necessarily arises. The ending of the current interregnum demands that the Fourth Reich is given national symbols that are on the one hand unmistakable with the symbols of the three previous Reichs, but that on the other hand, symbolise a development of that which has historically come into being.
In Dr. Oberlercher’s revised Draft of the Constitution, from the 9th of November 1999, it states, in article 10 section 3 sentence 1: “The flag of the Reich bears a black cross in a golden bed on a red field in standing or lying form.”
This design was created by the lawyer Dr. Josef Wirmer in 1943, and was made known to a small circle. Regardless of the fact that Dr. Wirmer, by helping to overthrow the Führer of the German People and Chancellor of the Reich, made himself guilty of high treason, it is certain that this is the only known design of a flag for the Fourth Reich that was designed at a point in time, when the Reich still had the ability to act. It was undoubtedly a crime to participate in the overthrowing of the government of the Reich during the state of emergency of the year 1943 – a crime that was quite rightly punished with death. But today, it can only be a matter of creating a Reich without Hitler. The appreciation and acknowledgement of the epoch of historical National Socialism, and of the heroic salvation of the German Reich by the will to hold out, of the German People and its Führer, necessitates the true ending of the Third by a Fourth Reich, which is already expressed in new national symbols.
Wirmer was drawn into the circles of resistance against the Third Reich due to his profession as a devout Catholic. For Wirmer, the cross was on the one hand a symbol for Germany’s membership of the Christian family of nations, on the other hand however the association to the cross of the German war-flags was desired. Wirmer considered the clear propinquity of the flag to the Scandinavian flags to be a drawback, but it can also be seen as an identification with the Germanic family of nations. This flag-design combines the colours black-red-gold in the heraldic correct order (the metal-colour separates the ground-colours), and symbolises a renunciation of the tricolour, which was a product of the French counter-revolution (Gallic rebellion) of 1789.
For us, who are striving for a new order, there can be no going back in history. As such, the flaw that the flag has no tradition, will quickly be brushed aside, when, in the present struggle for the freedom of our People and its subject of the right of nations, the German Reich, it becomes the generally recognised symbol of the whole, and will not be perceived as the sign of a part group or a part organisation.
Josef Wirmer
The lawyer Josef Wirmer was counted as one of the leading persons of the resistance against Hitler’s government.
Josef Wirmer was born on the 19th of March 1901 in Paderborn, yet spent the greater part of his youth in Warburg, where, from 1909, his father was headmaster of a grammar school. Here Josef, the second of five children, did his Abitur [A levels/SAT exams] in 1920, with distinction. A certain contrast to his father resulted from his active participation in the setting up of the Wandervogel movement at the Warburg grammar school. The resolute withdrawal from the conservative conduct of the generation of his father, that had already turned him into a convinced democrat as a student, earned him the nickname “red Wirmer”. At first Wirmer studied in Freiburg im Breisgau (where he joined the Catholic students’ society “Brisgovia” and the “Flamberg”) and then in Berlin where he sat his state (Referendar) examination in 1924 and his examination as a graduate civil servant in 1927, after which he established himself as a lawyer there in 1928. As lawyer in Berlin he joined the markedly democratic wing of the Centre and staunchly advocated the coalition between the SPD and the Centre. He did not fall in with the widespread willingness to make compromises with Hitler, after his election victory on the 5th of March 1933.
As a committed opponent of the National Socialists, he came into contact with the circle of resistance around the trade unionist Jakob Kaiser. Josef Wirmer lamented “the perversion of right and justice”; “the will to re-establish the right of the punishment of the guilty” drove Wirmer into active resistance.
In 1941 began his co-operation with the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl-Friedrich Goerdeler, who was the political leader of the German resistance and who wanted to appoint Wirmer as Minister of Justice. He concerned himself especially with the reform of justice, and dedicated several memoranda to this topic. He proved to be conciliatory between the social-political reformism of the trade unionists and the conservative basic attitude of Goerdeler and his friends. Temporarily he mediated between Goerdeler and Stauffenberg.
His brother Otto Wirmer wrote: “To contravene the formal law of a tyranny seemed to him, from his moral and ethical viewpoint, to be, on a higher plane, the fulfilment of the right that he had served all his life in reverential humility. Freisler’s insults, that were seething with hatred, especially against him, allow us to recognise that the regime considered him a substantial opponent, just as this had already shown itself many years earlier, in the proceedings in a court of honour, by which he was expelled from the Association for the Protection of Right for his courageous defence of racially persecuted people.”
In spring 1944, Wirmer was the only one of the Kaiser-circle to support Stauffenberg’s assassination plan. After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, he did not consider fleeing, in order to spare his family from being held liable for his activities. He was arrested on the 4th of August 1944.
Josef Wirmer, who was to be entrusted with the rebuilding of justice in Germany, was accused as one of the main persons involved in the act of the 20th of July. Sentences such as “When I hang, Herr President, not I will be afraid, but you”, or his reply to Freisler’s remark “Soon you will be in hell”, “It will be my pleasure, when you soon follow, Herr President”, give proof of his enormous courage and his outstanding presence of mind.
Two hours after the pronouncement of judgement, at the show trial in front of the National Court of Justice, by the President of the National Court of Justice, Roland Freisler, on the 8th of September 1944, the 43 year old stepped through the door into the room of execution in Berlin-Plötzensee, in order to be hanged. His body was cremated on the same day.
