Otto Ernst Remer (18 August 1912 – 4 October 1997) was a German Wehrmacht Army officer in World War II who played a major role in stopping the 20 July plot in 1944 against Adolf Hitler.

He attended a military academy and was commissioned as an officer in the German Army 1932 at the age of 20, a few months before Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, initiating a series of laws in the Weimar Republic which made him the sole leader in the country.

On 20 July 1944 Wehrmacht officers staged a coup d'etat and attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by means of a bomb-attack at the "Wolf's Lair" in East Prussia.

In the evening of 20 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who had carried out the attack upon Hitler arrived back in Berlin, and, believing that he had succeeded in killing him, issued orders to Remer to arrest several senior Nazi Government officials, claiming that they were part of a coup.

[citation needed] For the rest of the war, Remer commanded the Führerbegleitbrigade (FBB), a field unit formed from a Grossdeutschland cadre, in East Prussia, and during the Ardennes Offensive.

[1] With the party banned, Remer faced criminal charges from the West German government for being actively engaged in an attempt to re-establish a neo-Nazi political movement.

After an arrest warrant was issued against him on these charges, he went into hiding at a chalet belonging to Countess Faber-Castell, an early supporter of the Socialist Reich Party, before subsequently fleeing to Egypt.

Its content led to a court case where he was sentenced to 22 months' imprisonment in October 1992 for incitement of racial hatred by writing and publishing a series of articles stating that the Holocaust was a myth.

Remer filed numerous appeals against his conviction, however his complaints of unfairness of trial and violations of freedom of speech were unanimously rejected, ultimately by the European Commission on Human Rights, to which he had taken his case.

The High Court of Spain ruled against requests made by the German Government for his extradition back to Germany, stating that he had not committed any crimes under Spanish law.

[citation needed] Helmut Friebe, a leader of the Alliance of German Soldiers and former Generalleutnant of the Wehrmacht, had the following to say about Remer: "No judgment will be made here as to whether his decision on 20 July was right or wrong.

But the consequences of his decision were so terrible,... that we old soldiers had expected that a man to whom destiny gave such a burden to carry until the end of his life would recognize this, and would thereafter live quietly and in reclusion.