Pictured: The victim in question.

Quoting Clarence Lusane’s Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro‐Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era, chapter 10, pages 216–7:

Somewhere around a dozen SS men arrived as the evening was coming to an end. It was around 10 o’clock. They had been looking for and finally found their victim, a leader in the opposition to their authority. As his daughter recalls, this would be the last time his family would see him alive. Hilarius “Lari” Gilges was an early fatality of the [Third Reich] in the Düsseldorf area—but certainly not the last. Only twenty‐four when murdered, he became a hero and a martyr for many who would resist the fascists in the years to follow.

Not a lot is known about Gilges’s early life. He was born on 4 March 1909 in Düsseldorf and was of mixed‐race heritage. His mother, in a 1945 interview, noted that the family was working class. For Hilarius, his class upbringing and experiences and his racial uniqueness would inform his life activities as he grew up. Even in the pre‐[1933] period, he was, as an Afro‐German, often the target of racial taunts, insults, and slanders.

These provocations would push him toward more radical politics during his teen years. According to his mother, he became active in the workers’ movement at a young age. At only sixteen or seventeen, in 1926, Gilges joined the German Communist Youth Organization (KJVD). Reportedly, he was extremely commited to his political work in the party.

In addition to being a labor organizer, Gilges was a tap dancer and an actor. It is unknown how he became interested in tap dance, a form of dance with a distinct African American character—there is no evidence one way or the other that he was influenced by outside dancers. Even in this area, Gilges fought for justice and a progressive politics.

When he was only twenty‐one, around 1930, he became one of the cofounders of the leftist worker‐entertainment group the Northwest Ran, in Düsseldorf. The Northwest Ran group, comprising actors, musicians, and other performers, organized anti[fascist] demonstrations and protests in an attempt to stem the growing tide of [Fascism]. By this time, the [NSDAP] had become a serious force across the country including the Düsseldorf area.

The agitation of the entertainment troup and his labor organizing in all the cities and villages of the low Rhine, had made Gilges well known beyond his hometown. These activities strengthened the hate of his enemies and their determination to rid themselves of this troublesome and even dangerous black man.

The situation heated up in 1931 as labor unrest grew and large demonstrations occurred at the Marz‐Gedenfeier work site. At one of the protests, racists were able to provoke Gilges into a fight in which the police, who were politically reactionary, if not pro[fascist], seized the opportunity to punish him. He was arrested and sentenced some weeks later by the country court in Düsseldorf. He was given one year in the area prison.

If the authorities believed that a year of incarceration would diminish Gilges’s organizing activities, they were disabused of that notion fairly quickly after his release.

Shortly after getting out of prison, he aggressively renewed his position as a leader of the labor movement in the area. In fact, according to his family, his activities grew as the danger of the [Fascist] takeover loomed larger and larger. Only months before the [German Fascists] came to power, he was agitating and organizing through the party. In the 1932 elections, he traveled through nearly every city, town, and village attempting to mobilize against the coming fascist era.

When […] the [German Fascists] came to national power in January 1933, Gilges was at the top of the list of enemies of the state in the Düsseldorf area. He began to work both above ground and underground as the [Third Reich] set out to destroy the left and any opposition that remained. In the face of death threats and other warnings, Gilges refused to back down or go into hiding. In addition to his commitment to his work, he also had a family by then. He was married and had two daughters.

One daughter, Franziska Helmuss, recalls with a deep sense of loss the night they came to get him and the aftermath. She remembers, on the night of June 20,

My father was grabbed in front of my eyes. Twelve big SS officers dragged him out of the house. The next time I saw him was here [the Rhine river near Düsseldorf], floating under the bridge. He’d been stabbed 37 times and shot through the head […] His funeral was well attended, but exclusively by women. The men were too afraid to be associated with him. The stonemason who made the gravestone for my father was incarcerated for five years in a [Fascist] concentration camp.⁴

According to his mother, Gilges’s killers were known. She noted that one of his murderers was the notorious SS guard Carl Wüsthoff of Düsseldorf. The cruelty and torture involved in Gilges’s murder expressed a vindictiveness that would characterize much of what was to follow for the next dozen years. Also, the fear that Helmuss described on the part of the men (and the bravery on the part of the women) would be repeated as the terrorist state consolidated itself and step‐by‐evil‐step eliminated its perceived and real enemies.⁵

The city of Düsseldorf put up a monument to Gilges near the site where his body was found. To the very end, he refused to submit to the [Third Reich]. Although attacked by his foes for his politics and his black skin, he always viewed himself in the broadest terms and battled the [Fascists] on behalf of working‐class people and the nation as a whole. The respect he earned was remembered by all who knew him. Maria Wacher, who was in Northwest Ran with him, sums up Gilges best when she says, simply, “he was a fighter.”⁶

(Emphasis added.)