[1] As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force (the predecessor of the Luftwaffe) and training pilots in the Soviet Union.

Ossietzky was baptized as a Roman Catholic in Hamburg on 10 November 1889 and confirmed in the Lutheran Hauptkirche St Michaelis on 23 March 1904.

[3] Despite his failure to finish Realschule (a form of German secondary school), Ossietzky succeeded in embarking on a career in journalism, with the topics of his articles ranging from theatre criticism to feminism and the problems of early motorisation.

[citation needed] That year, he married Maud Lichfield-Woods, a Mancunian suffragette, born to British colonial officer and the great-granddaughter of an Indian princess in Hyderabad.

Officially labour groups intended to assist with civilian projects, in reality the members were soldiers secretly trained by the Reichswehr in order to exceed the limits on troop strength set by the Treaty of Versailles.

The Black Reichswehr became infamous for using Feme murders to punish "traitors" who, for example, revealed the locations of weapons' stockpiles or names of members.

Secret "trials" were conducted of which the victims were unaware, and after finding the accused guilty they would send out a man to execute the "court's" sentence of death.

Regarding the Feme murders, Ossietzky wrote:[4] Lieutenant Schulz (charged with the murder of informers against the Black Reichswehr) did nothing but carry out the orders given him, and that certainly Colonel von Bock, and probably Colonel von Schleicher and General Seeckt, should be sitting in the dock beside him.Reflecting his pacifism, Ossietzky became secretary of the German Peace Society (German: Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft) in 1919.

[5] In the 1920s, Ossietzky became one of the leaders of the "homeless left", centered on the newspaper Die Weltbühne which rejected Communism, but found the Social Democrats too inclined to compromise with the old order.

He often drew a contrast between the fate of Social Democrat Felix Fechenbach who was imprisoned after a questionable trial for publishing secret documents showing that the German Empire was responsible for World War I and that of the Navy captain Hermann Ehrhardt of the Freikorps whose men occupied Berlin during the Kapp Putsch, killed several hundred civilians and was never tried for his actions.

[7] Ossietzky was especially critical of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold), the paramilitary group set up by the Social Democrats to defend democracy.

Administered by a bureaucratic caste that is responsible for the misery of recent years in domestic and foreign affairs and that smothers all signs of fresh life with a cold hand.

[citation needed] On 12 March 1929 Die Weltbühne published an article by Walter Kreiser, one of its writers: an exposé of the training of a special air unit of the Reichswehr, referred to as Abteilung M (Section M), which was secretly training in Germany and in Soviet Russia, in violation of Germany's agreements under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

The arrests were widely seen[citation needed] at the time as an effort to silence Die Weltbühne, which had been a vocal critic of the Reichswehr's policies and secret expansion.

They are the barrel organs of fascism, whose pseudo-revolutionary shrieks drown out the softer tremolo of social reaction.In the same essay, Ossietzky wrote: Intellectual anti-Semitism was the special prerogative of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, concretized the fantasies of Count Arthur de Gobineau, which had penetrated to Bayreuth.

Contemporary anti-Semitic literature, insofar as it is not simple, crude Jew-baiting, in so far as it claims intellectual consideration, is satisfied to postulate an imposing Teutonism which, examined critically dissolves into thin air like a beautiful Epicurean god.

In November 1935, when a representative of the International Red Cross visited Ossietzky, he reported that he saw "a trembling, deadly pale something, a creature that appeared to be without feeling, one eye swollen, teeth knocked out, dragging a broken, badly healed leg .

On 4 May 1938, he died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody,[2] of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps.

[citation needed] Supporters of convicted Nobel Prize-winning Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo compared him to Ossietzky, both being prevented by the authorities from accepting their awards and both having died while in custody.

Ossietzky's daughter Rosalinde von Ossietzky-Palm took part in the formal ceremony, accompanied by then Prime Minister of Lower Saxony Gerhard Schröder.

[citation needed] In 1992, Ossietzky's 1931 conviction was upheld by Germany's Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice), applying the law as it stood in 1931.

According to the opinion of the Reichsgericht, every citizen owes his Fatherland a duty of allegiance regarding information, and endeavours towards the enforcement of existing laws may be implemented only through the utilization of responsible domestic state organs, and never by appealing to foreign governments.