Ewald Hanstein

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Ewald Hanstein (on April 11, 1995 at the commemoration ceremony "50 years of liberation of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp" in Nordhausen)

Ewald Hanstein (born April 8, 1924 in Oels ; † September 4, 2009 in Bremen ) was a German Sinto and survivor of the Porajmos . He survived Auschwitz-Birkenau , Buchenwald , Dora-Mittelbau and the death marches . After the end of the war, he fought for decades for members of the Roma minority to be recognized as victims of National Socialism .

Life

Childhood in the Weimar Republic

Ewald Hanstein grew up mainly with his grandparents on Klosterstrasse in the city center of Wroclaw . The father worked as a worker and musician, the parents traveled to Silesia from spring to autumn. The mother traded in haberdashery, bobbin blankets and household items. Ewald Hanstein developed a lot of musical talent under the favorable family conditions, so that he was always able to make music professionally throughout his life. In the 1930s at the latest, the father and an uncle joined the KPD . The two thus belonged to a minority of the German Sinti, for whom - according to the son in his memoirs - "(was) unusual to be politically active." The father played in a minstrel band of the KPD, he painted posters and dealt with correspondence for his party. Group meetings were also held in the grandparents' home. The son remembered tangible disputes with the SA, in which his father took part after his parents moved with the children to Breslau-Masselwitz in the proletarian Scheitnig district and a house search after the NSDAP and its German national alliance partners had come to power. " treacherous documents were searched for ". Sport also played an important role in the family. Ewald's uncle Rudi Schmidt was a well-known boxer (light middleweight) who made it to the Silesian champion and who was trained and promoted by Walter Neusel . A second uncle, Siegfried Schmidt, brother of Rudi Schmidt, was a goalkeeper at Blau-Weiß 90 Berlin .

National Socialism

In 1936 the family moved to Berlin in order to avoid the special visibility in the smaller Breslau. A little later she was forced to live in the Marzahn "gypsy camp " , a forced camp. In 1942 Ewald Hanstein fled after rumors of deportation from the Marzahn camp, initially to the apartment of an uncle who had remained undetected. Antifascists declared that he found work at various companies and, after his uncle's deportation, found a new hiding place among Berlin non-Sinti. In May 1943 he was discovered, arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At that time, his mother and six siblings, who had been deported there from Marzahn, were already there. They did not survive the camp. The father had already been imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938 as part of the “ Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich ” campaign. He did not survive the camp either. The young Hanstein escaped the liquidation of the so-called " Gypsy family camp" in Birkenau in August 1944 because, unlike his mother and siblings, he was classified as still able to work and was "on transport" to the Buchenwald , Mittelbau-Dora and the Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamps and Harzungen came. When the Harzungen camp was evacuated, the SS forced the remaining prisoners on a death march across the Harz into the Bördeland , where Ewald Hanstein was liberated by members of the US Army near Eggersdorf in mid-April 1945 .

In his memoirs he wrote about the fate of his other family members: “When I arrived in Auschwitz, only three siblings of my mother were still alive. When I arrived in Buchenwald, I heard that they had all been gassed. "

After the end of National Socialism

After the end of the Nazi regime, Hanstein stayed in Eggersdorf an der Saale, made contact with locals, trained as a locksmith, worked in a radiator factory and married into an Eggersdorf family. He joined the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN) and, since he also remembered what he said was his "far-sighted" communist father "(felt) a lot of sympathy for social democrats and communists", he became a member of the SPD and after its merger with the KPD, the SED and the FDJ . As a victim of Nazi persecution, which, as Hanstein emphasizes in his memoirs, "was (was) honorable" in the GDR, he was given the opportunity to switch from the radiator factory to the railway police . Accused for obscure reasons of having been a police officer in the western sectors of Berlin contrary to the regulations, he was held in custody for several months in 1950. Although he was not convicted, he was released from the police force. In 1954 he went west to Bremen with his family. There soon contacts arose with other survivors from the minority. In the GDR, he later explained, the existence of Sinti had been “hushed up”, in the West it had been “declared a scandal”. There "the police reports at Himmler could have been copied." In Bremen, not far from the camp for GDR emigrants, where the Hanstein family lived until they moved to an apartment in the city, an urban living space for the minority ("the Riespott "), which reminded Hanstein of the Marzahn camp. In fact, it turned out in the 1970s that it was a former subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp - in which many Sinti, including the famous boxer Johann Wilhelm Trollmann, a relative of Hanstein, had been imprisoned. There he became active for other Sinti in legal and social issues. He found work at Borgward and on the side made a lot of music with his own group ( rhythm group Hanstein ) and even performing together with the Peheiros .

In 1957 Hanstein applied in Bremen for compensation as a victim of Nazi persecution. His request was denied again and again. It was not until the early 1980s that a public health officer was willing to admit that he suffered 30% damage caused by persecution, so that he was now entitled to a pension. Then almost a decade later the percentage was increased again. Hanstein generalized his experience to the conclusion that those persecuted by Nazi had to “fight for a mini pension” for many years, while those “who are responsible for our suffering receive fat pensions that are forwarded to them abroad”.

From 1979 he became involved in the Bremen Sinti Association, which became a state association in the now established Association of German Sinti and Roma . Hanstein became the first chairman of the Bremer and Bremerhaven groups and later became honorary chairman. The association organized school projects and was responsible for a small workshop in which Hanstein taught locksmith and welding skills. Research was carried out with the historian Hans Hesse into the Nazi persecution of the Bremen and Bremerhaven Sinti. He also became a board member of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg . In 1993 Hanstein was appointed by the state government to the advisory board of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial.

Hanstein was active as a representative of the generation of persecuted people in Bremen schools, town houses, church and other institutions and at regional and national events. In 2002 he was honored with the Franco-Paselli Peace Prize by the Bremen International School of Peace . In 2006 he received the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon for his political work .

literature

Web links

Commons : Ewald Hanstein  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ewald Hanstein, Meine Hundred Leben, Bremen 2005, p. 20.
  2. ^ On "Street battles" in Scheitnig 1933: Willy Cohn, No right, nowhere. Diary of the fall of Breslau Jewry 1933-1941, Vol. 1, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2007, p. 17.
  3. ↑ Ewald Hanstein, Meine Hundred Leben, Bremen 2005, p. 14f.
  4. ↑ Anna Blume: As indelible as the number tattooed on the arm  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / archiv.mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de  
  5. ↑ All information, unless otherwise stated: Ewald Hanstein, Meine Hundred Leben, Bremen 2005.
  6. ↑ Ewald Hanstein, Meine Hundred Leben, Bremen 2005, p. 85, pictures.
  7. ^ Ewald Hanstein: Meine Hundred Leben , Bremen 2005, pp. 85, 94ff.
  8. ^ Ewald Hanstein: Meine Hundred Leben , Bremen 2005, p. 126.
  9. ↑ Ewald Hanstein: Meine Hundred Leben , Bremen 2005, p. 128f.
  10. ↑ Ewald Hanstein: Meine Hundred Leben , Bremen 2005, p. 150.
  11. ↑ Senate Chancellery, Federal Merit Crosses for Ewald Hanstein and Wolf Leschmann, February 16, 2006, see: [1] .
  12. ^ Mourning for Ewald Hanstein , Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, September 9, 2009
  13. ^ Ewald Hanstein: Meine Hundred Leben, Bremen 2005, p. 152ff.
  14. ↑ Senate Chancellery, Federal Merit Crosses for Ewald Hanstein and Wolf Leschmann, February 16, 2006, see: [2] .
personal data
SURNAME Hanstein, Ewald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Sinti functionary and survivor of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Oels , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH September 4, 2009
Place of death Bremen