Siegfried Jägendorf

Siegfried Jägendorf , originally Schmiel Jägendorf (born August 1, 1885 in Zwiniacze (northern Bukowina , today Swenjatschyn ); † September 5, 1970 in Sun City , today Menifee , California ), was an Austro-Hungarian , then Romanian and finally American Electrical engineer and engineer . A Jew himself , he saved around 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust as the head of an important war enterprise in Transnistria .

Origin, education and family

Schmiel Jägendorf was the only son and youngest child of Abraham Jägendorf and his wife Hannah Bassie Jägendorf , née Offenberger . He grew up in a provincial, petty-bourgeois and Orthodox Jewish milieu . His father ran a water mill.

After a few years of traditional religious education, he attended high school for four years . Schmiel then completed a three-year apprenticeship in mechanical engineering at the Technical and Commercial College in Vienna . During the Vienna years he was a member of a Zionist student organization. Jägendorf also studied engineering with a focus on toolmaking at the Mittweida technical center . He completed his studies on May 31, 1907 with a diploma in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering.

On May 9, 1909, Jägendorf, who had meanwhile chosen the first name Siegfried , married in Radautz Hinde (later Hilda ) Feller , daughter of the owner of a fish processing company in Radautz. The marriage resulted in two daughters who were raised secularly.

Career until 1938

During the First World War , Jägendorf served as first lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army . Among other things, he led the construction of an electric fence that secured a section of the border between Bukovina and Russia .

After the war, Jägendorf became an employee of Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Vienna . In 1922 he took up the post of director of the sales and customer service branch in Chernivtsi for this company . With the move to the capital of Bukovina, Jägendorf, who followed an upper-class lifestyle with his family , took on Romanian citizenship .

From 1923 Jägendorf worked for four years as general director of Foresta , the company for the timber industry in Bukovina. He then went into business for himself, first with a coal briquette factory in Vienna, then with a radio factory in Chernivtsi. Both ventures were unsuccessful.

Rescuing Jews

In 1938, after the " Anschluss of Austria ", Jägendorf fled Vienna to Romania. His daughters emigrated to the United States with their husbands in 1938 and 1939, respectively ; Attempts by the married couple Siegfried and Hilda Jägendorf to follow their daughters there failed.

On October 12, 1941, the Jägendorf couple and almost the entire Jewish population of Radautz were deported in cattle wagons to Transnistria , an area that had been conquered by troops of the Wehrmacht and the Romanian 3rd and 4th Army at the beginning of the German-Soviet War was. The fascist and anti-Semitic regime of the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu had previously decided to “cleanse” the Bukovina, Bessarabia and Dorohoi of around 140,000 to 150,000 Jews by expelling them. The Romanian administration in Transnistria denied the deportees food, water, shelter, heating material, clothing, soap and medicine. When the Red Army of the Soviet Union recaptured the area in March 1944, around 50,000 of the 140,000 to 150,000 deported Jews were still alive.

Even before the deportation, Jägendorf had managed to rise to the top of the Jewish community in Radautz, because in order to safeguard Jewish interests, he had repeatedly demonstrated skill in dealing with the Romanian authorities. In Moghilev-Podolski , the place to which the Jägendorf couple were deported, Siegfried Jägendorf was also considered the leading representative of the Jews. Dressed in a Romanian officer's uniform - as a result of anti-Semitic regulations he had been removed from the Romanian army at the beginning of 1940 - Jägendorf went to the German city commander the day after his arrival to find out about the situation. Jägendorf quickly contacted the Romanian prefect of the city, who like him had served in the Austro-Hungarian army. Jägendorf offered to restart the power plant and the Turnatoria machine factory in the city, which had been badly damaged by the war , provided that he could recruit Jewish specialists and workers for it. Both projects were allowed. Jägendorf recruited around 10,000 deported Jews from Moghilev and the surrounding camps, who were thus relieved of forced labor and “ evacuations ”. Jägendorf acted authoritarian within his area of ​​management and did not tolerate any contradiction.

post war period

After the war defeat of the Wehrmacht became foreseeable and Antonescu sought cooperation with the Allies , Wilhelm Filderman , the leading representative of the Romanian Jews, was able to obtain the repatriation of Jägendorf and some of his most important employees to Romania. It took place on March 7, 1944. The Jägendorf couple came to Bucharest via Czernowitz, Radautz and Botoșani .

At the end of August 1946, the Jägendorf couple left Romania with the aim of emigrating to the United States . They reached the new world on December 23, 1946. The files of the Jewish Committee in Moghilev were in the luggage of the poor . Siegfried Jägendorf contemplated bringing reparation suits against Germany on the basis of this file . In 1948 Siegfried and Hilda Jägendorf moved to California. The engineer found a job with the electricity company Fischbach & Moore . There he was promoted to head of the costing department in Los Angeles .

In 1956 he began to write his memoirs . After more than ten years, he completed this project and traveled to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem . He offered her the archive of the Jewish Committee on the condition that the memorial must publish his memoirs in the present form. Those responsible in Jerusalem, however, insisted on checking the statements made in the memoirs beforehand. For this reason, the handover of files and the publication plans failed.

Siegfried Jägendorf died on September 5, 1970 as a result of cancer of heart failure . The American journalist Aron Hirt-Manheimer published the memoirs in 1991 under the title Jagendorf's Foundry: Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust 1941–1944 together with detailed comments on the individual chapters. The German translation was published in 2009.

literature

• Siegfried Jägendorf: The miracle of Moghilev. The rescue of ten thousand Jews from the Romanian Holocaust. Edited and commented by Aron Hirt-Manheimer. Transit, Berlin 2009 (Original title: Jagendorf's Foundry: Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust 1941–1944. HarperCollins, San Francisco, CA 1991, ISBN 0-06-016106-X , translated by Ulrike Döpfer), ISBN 978-3-88747-241 -2 .

Web links

• Book review by Richard Friebe in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 8, 2010.
• Book review by Ernest Wichner on the arte website on October 15, 2009.
• Book review ( memento from January 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on the Deutschlandradio website from January 6, 2010.
• Othmar Andrée: “Mogilew was not for the naive”. Jewish resistance and rescue attempts in Mogilew-Podolski, 1941–1944. On Siegfried Jägendorf's memories. (Accessed on January 6, 2013)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 10.
2. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 10 f.
3. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 11.
4. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 11.
5. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 12.
6. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 13 f.
7. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 14.
8. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 14, p. 26, p. 29.
9. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 46 f.
10. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 52.
11. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, pp. 33-39, pp. 55-57.
12. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 125.
13. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, pp. 173-175, pp. 183-185.
14. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, pp. 189–191.
15. ^ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 192.
16. ↑ Jägendorf, Hirt-Manheimer, p. 193.