Otto and Elise Hampel

Otto and Elise Hampel were a working class German couple who created a simple method of protest against Nazism in Berlin during the middle years of World War II.

Shortly after the end of the war, their Gestapo file was given to German novelist Hans Fallada, and their story inspired his 1947 novel, translated into English and published in 2009 as Every Man Dies Alone (Alone in Berlin in the UK).

[2] After learning that Elise's brother had been killed in action, the Hampels undertook efforts to encourage resistance against the Third Reich.

[2] From September 1940 until their arrest in autumn 1942, they hand-wrote over 287 postcards, dropping them into mailboxes and leaving them in stairwells in Berlin, often near Wedding, where they lived.

[5] Their life was fictionalized in the Hans Fallada novel, where they are called Otto and Anna Quangel, and it is their son who is killed, rather than the wife's brother.