Opinion: Speaking truth to Nazi power — the courage and cost of defending free speech

Standing up for free speech can be costly. Oct. 27 is one of the days that reminds me of that fact. This was the day 82 years ago that one of my free-speech heroes, Helmuth Hübener, was executed for speaking out against Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Hübener was only a teenager, but his deeply held religious beliefs filled him with disgust at the antisemitism and bigotry that he witnessed in Nazi Germany. After Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass” that resulted in the deaths of nearly 100 Jews in 1938, Hübener stopped participating in the Hitler Youth (which was required at the time).
And so began Hübener’s life as part of the resistance against the Nazis. During an apprenticeship at the Hamburg Social Authority in 1941, he met others who were part of the resistance. He began to listen to enemy broadcasts on a radio that his older brother had been given by a French soldier, even though doing so was illegal. Listening to these broadcasts exposed to him the depth of the evil of Hitler’s regime and the fact that Germany was losing the war.
Hübener knew that if he spoke out, he could be caught, jailed or killed. He could have stayed silent, but he believed that speaking the truth was worth it even when it was costly.
Over the next year, he and two of his friends began to publish and distribute up to 60 pamphlets that exposed the truth about the Nazi regime. One pamphlet described Germany as “the country without freedom, the country of terror and tyranny.” Other pamphlets described the true realities of the war and urged Germans to rise up in protest.
Eventually, a co-worker discovered what Hübener was doing and reported him to the Gestapo. In February 1942, Hübener and his friends were arrested and tried for treason. Because he was only 17 at the time, there was a chance that Hübener could receive clemency if he apologized for his actions. But he refused. He was sentenced to death and tortured and abused. But Hübener stayed firm, and in doing so may have saved the life of his friends, who were given lighter sentences while he took the brunt of the blame.
After his sentence of death was read in August 1942, Hübener faced the judges who had just condemned him and courageously said, “Now I must die, even though I have committed no crime. So now it’s my turn, but your turn will come.”
We do not face anything like Helmuth Hübener did. We won’t be jailed or beheaded for speaking out. We are blessed to live in a nation where free speech and dissent receive robust protections.
But we do have things to worry about. We might be de-platformed or fired for speaking our minds. We might offend and lose our relationships with people we care about because of our different opinions. This might make us shrink and choose silence over speaking out, but Hübener’s courage and conviction should inspire all of us to be more courageous. We should know how many fought for the rights we take for granted, and we should be willing to speak out even when doing so is costly.