workingclasshistory:

On this day, 28 April 1909, biracial Black German anti-Nazi labour organiser and actor Hilarius Gilges was born in a working class household in Düsseldorf, Germany. In 1926 he joined the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD), and a few years later he founded a radical worker entertainment group called the Northwest Ran. Northwest Ran put on working class plays, music and other entertainment, as well as organising anti-fascist protests. After a conflict with racists and police at a demonstration, Gilges was arrested and jailed for one year. Despite this, he continued his activism, and travelled through many towns and villages attempting to mobilise opposition to Nazism.
After the Nazi takeover, in June 1933, he was abducted from his apartment in front of his family by a dozen SS officers. His body was soon found in the River Rhine, with 37 stab wounds and a bullet wound to the head. One of his daughters, Franziska Helmuss, later recalled: “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 Nazi concentration camp.” Despite some of his killers being known, none of them were punished after the war.
A plaza in Düsseldorf by his apartment was named after him in 2003. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1974361646082309/?type=3