Paul Langen (12 January 1893 – 16 March 1945) was a German teacher who opposed the national socialist regime and spoke out against nazi propaganda and the continuation of World War II. He was arrested by the Gestapo and convicted of Wehrkraftzersetzung ("subversion of the war effort") in 1943. He died in prison from typhus. Childhood and early life Paul Langen was born on 12 January 1893 in Nippes, Cologne, the son of a machinist and the youngest of five children. His teachers described him as a "good but difficult" pupil who "refused to subordinate himself". After graduating from the Realgymnasium with the Abitur in 1913, he attended a business school and studied political science and economics (Staatswissenschaften) at the universities of Bonn and Cologne until 1914. At the breakout of World War I in August 1914, Langen joined the army as a pioneer. In 1918 he was released from service after "incapacitation due to typhoid fever and malaria". After the war, he studied philosophy and history at the universities of Bonn and Frankfurt. He also attended a teachers' college in Wipperfürth. When he was offered a position as a teacher in Hetzenholz near Much in 1920, he withdrew from university studies. In 1922 he married Clara Müller, a woman from Siegburg, with whom he had three children. In 1923 he completed his formal education as a teacher with the 2nd Teacher's Exam. Langen's experiences during World War I affected his mental well-being. After becoming the headmaster of a Hauptschule (general school) near Gummersbach in 1928, he engaged in a bureaucratic struggle with the school authorities regarding a disagreement over the adjustment of his salary depending on the duration of his war service. In 1931, the local schools inspector decided to relocate him to another school due to neurasthenia. Langen chose to be relocated to the primary school in Holzlar because of the village's location near Bonn and the river Rhine. In 1931 he became the school's headmaster. During Nazi Germany According to his daughter Hiltigunt, Paul Langen and his wife Clara were the only people in Holzlar who did not vote for the NSDAP in the federal election of March 1933, which was a fact well known in the village. She further claims that the day after the election, two stormtroopers appeared on the schoolyard "to punish him", however "he threw them over the fence". In contrast to these