Fritz Spanier

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Fritz Marcus Spanier (born May 15, 1902 in Recklinghausen ; died June 16, 1967 in Düsseldorf ) was a German doctor. He was one of the passengers on the St. Louis who tried in vain to obtain asylum in Cuba or the USA in 1939 . At the time of the German occupation of the Netherlands , he was in charge of the hospital in the Westerbork transit camp .

biography

Education and family

Fritz Spanier grew up in Düsseldorf and attended school there; In 1921 he passed the Abitur . “Jewish orthodoxy and a German patriotism that is barely comprehensible today determined his youth,” wrote Rabbi Robert Raphael Geis in 1962 on the occasion of Spaniard's 60th birthday. He completed his medical studies at the University of Bonn . In the 1920s he married Babette Seidemann (born in 1905 in Krefeld ). In 1927 he was charged with a thesis entitled Ueber das Glykosidspaltungs- and reducing power of enterococci and its importance to their distinction from the streptococci at the University of Leipzig doctorate and as a doctor approved ; then he worked at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Wedding . On January 20, 1932, his twin daughters Renate and Ines were born in Berlin .

Nazi era

At the beginning of the Nazi era , Spanier was discharged from the clinic in 1933 because of his Jewish origins. He moved to Düsseldorf and opened a family doctor's practice . After the November pogroms in 1938 and the withdrawal of Spaniards license to practice medicine, the couple decided to leave Germany. With the help of a medical student who belonged to the SS and who accompanied them in uniform, the family reached Hamburg unmolested .

On May 13, 1939, the family boarded the St. Louis to travel to Cuba with 900 people, mostly Jews ; the Spaniards had 1st class tickets. The captain of the ship, Gustav Schröder , had a refugee board committee set up, which Fritz Spanier was supposed to lead, but who refused to do so because he did not feel up to such a task. After about a month, the ship and its passengers returned to Europe because both Cuba and the United States had refused to let the people into the country. This aimless voyage of the ship went down in history as the odyssey of the St. Louis . On June 17, 1939, the Spaniards disembarked in Antwerp and traveled to the Netherlands .

The Spanier family initially spent six months there in a refugee camp in Amsterdam until they were relocated to the Centraal Vluchtelingenkamp Westerbork in February 1940 - before the Germans marched in. On April 10, 1940, Fritz Spanier got a job as head of the hospital there and remained as Head of Service IV after the camp had been taken over by the Germans in May. On July 1, 1942, the camp was converted into the Westerbork transit camp , from where Jewish people were transported to the extermination camps.

Under Spaniard's direction, the camp hospital developed into one of the best-equipped clinics in the Netherlands, where around 1500 people were cared for at weddings. Several hundred nurses worked in the “grotesque” and “gigantic” clinic as well as around 100 Jewish doctors, some of whom were among the best in the country. In the Westerbork camp, whose “most important characteristic” was “false hope”, inmates were shown a normal world with work, theater, sport and hospital, a “mirage”, as the historian Annabelle S. Slingerland called it. In the hospital, the camp inmates were cured of illnesses only to be able to deport them afterwards; and Spanier was the one who decided whether a patient was transportable or not, a “master of life and death”.

Spanier was considered the “head of a state within the state”, who had a “strangely strong position” due to a good relationship with the warehouse manager Albert Konrad Gemmeker , who was also from Düsseldorf . Thanks to this special position, he was able to protect himself and his family members in Westerbork from being abducted to the east. Spanier's parents, Amalie and Adolf Spanier, who lived in Düsseldorf, were deported to Theresienstadt on July 21, 1942 , where they died in quick succession in the spring of 1944.

The Jewish doctor Elie Aron Cohen (1909–1993), who also worked in the hospital in Westerbork, reported in his memoirs about Fritz Spanier: “[…] here droeg hij de mooiste kleren, kreeg het best eten en had vrouwen te kust en te keur. Hij was een goed arts. . . Heel veel mensen zullen goed en heel velen zullen kwaad van hem vertellen. Hij is een mens die zijn vriendinnen heeft bewermd en gediplomeerde krachten op transport heeft gesteld. Hij kon verschrikkelijk hardvochtig zijn en heel week "(" [...] here he wore the best clothes, got the best food and had women in abundance. He was a good doctor. [...] Many people get good and many bad speak to him. He is a person who has protected his friends and assigned trained personnel to the transport. He could be terribly hard-hearted for a week. ") Cohen himself was deported to Auschwitz with his wife and son on September 14, 1943 . He stated that Spanier pulled his protective hand off him because Cohen's Dutch wife said during an argument with a German inmate: “You are a typically German Jew.” Cohen's family were murdered in Auschwitz.

On February 8, 1944, almost the entire Jewish workforce at Westerbork Hospital was transported to Auschwitz. Spaniards and his family were also spared this deportation. In total, over 100,000 people were deported via Westerbork, of whom fewer than 6,000 survived the Holocaust . When the camp was liberated by Canadian forces on April 12, 1945 , around 900 people were still there. Gemmeker had left the warehouse the day before and had previously informed Spanier by phone that the warehouse was now "free".

After the war

Shortly after the end of the war in 1945, Fritz Spanier and his family, four other doctors, a pharmacist, several sisters and orderlies were brought from Westerbork by the Canadian army to the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to which around 3,700 inmates of the camp had previously been deported. There he worked as a doctor at the request of the Joint , the Jewish Relief Unit and the Jewish Agency . In 1947 he became chief physician of the British hospital in Neu-Hohne under Glyn Hughes . In 1950 the Spaniards divorced. Babette Spanier went to the USA with her children, Spanier himself married his second wife, Anna "Njuta" Schapiro, after a year. In 1951, after brief stays in Israel and Amsterdam , he moved back to Düsseldorf , where he reopened a medical practice.

Warehouse manager Gemmeker was a patient of Spanier in Düsseldorf after the war and is said to have been before 1939; He later told a Dutch journalist that he had changed doctors in the 1960s out of consideration for Spanier's Jewish patients. Gemmeker's former secretary and lover Elisabeth Hassel visited Spaniards when he was in hospital in the 1950s. Hermann Schliesser, a former fellow prisoner from Westerbork, also visited Fritz Spanier in the 1950s in Düsseldorf and disconcertedly turned down Spanier's suggestion to spend a cozy evening with Gemmeker and exchange memories.

It was not just Gemmeker who visited Spanier's practice after the war, as Der Spiegel reported in 1963: Spanier had other former members of the Westerbork guard among his patients who would not show any inhibitions because they themselves had not mistreated or killed any Jews. “They come because of his medical qualities, and apart from one he had bad memories, he treats them, not without astonishment at the peculiarities of the German disposition.” Geis wrote in 1962 that Spaniards' office was part of the “wailing wall” of the “rest of the Jewish community "In Düsseldorf has become" a burden that is even more difficult to bear than the oversized practice ".

Spanier sat on the board of the Düsseldorf Jewish Community and acted as an advisor to the federal government in matters of health problems for camp inmates. Spanier died in Düsseldorf in 1967, a few weeks after his 65th birthday.

Position in Westerbork

After the war, there were discussions about whether Spaniards had done enough to help his fellow prisoners in the camp. His advocates pointed out that he had deliberately misdiagnosed in order to prevent deportations. Unnecessary operations are also said to have been carried out and incorrect dates of birth given in the case of pregnancies to delay possible deportations. From October 1943 to January 1944 no transport went to Auschwitz: Spaniards had exaggerated an outbreak of polio to the camp management in order to be able to impose a quarantine on the camp. In addition, he said he refused, as ordered, to carry out sterilization .

Critics argued that Spaniards had not used their good relationship with Gemmeker enough to save people's lives. It was also said that he preferred German Jews to Dutch Jews and was for sale. Spanier himself declared in 1948 that he had made every effort to help the people in Westerbork. He also testified that, in his opinion, Gemmeker did not know that the deported Jews would be murdered.

Miscellaneous

On September 6, 2018, the piece was The Journey of the Lost by Daniel Kehlmann in the Theater in der Josefstadt premiered that the random walk of the St. Louis addressed. The actor Ulrich Reinthaller personified the role of Fritz Spanier. His wife Babette was portrayed by Sandra Cervik .

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ His work was humanity. On the death of Dr. Fritz Spanier. In: General Independent Jewish Weekly Newspaper , June 23, 1967.
  2. ^ A b Robert Raphael Geis : Helping man - saving doctor. Dr. Fritz Spanier 60 years . In: General weekly newspaper of Jews in Germany . May 18, 1962, p. 15 ( archive.org ).
  3. ↑ a b Dr. Fritz Spanier for his sixty-fifth . In: General Independent Jewish Weekly Newspaper , May 13, 1967.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i De familie Spanier. In: Bevrijdingsportretten. Retrieved May 25, 2018 (Dutch).
  5. ↑ a b Markus Schnöpf: Persecuted Doctors. In: geschichte.charite.de. Retrieved October 30, 2019 .
  6. ^ Markhof, Das St. Louis-Drama , p. 49.
  7. ^ Markhof, Das St. Louis-Drama , p. 71.
  8. ↑ a b c d The Holocaust: Read We Forget - Medische zorg in kamp Westerbork. In: holocaust-lestweforget.com. Retrieved October 30, 2019 (Dutch).
  9. ↑ Eva M. Moraal: Westerbork. Methodological considerations on a history of its importance . In: Janine Doerry et.al. (Ed.): Nazi forced camps in West Germany, France and the Netherlands. History and memory . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-76458-4 , p. 120 .
  10. ^ Westerbork Hospital - a blessing in disguise. In: Hectoen International. February 22, 2017, accessed October 30, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Jacques Presser: Ashes in the Wind. Destruction of Dutch Jewry . Souvenir Press, 1968, p. 425 (English).
  12. ↑ Eva Moral: As ik tomorrow niet op transport ga… Kamp Westerbork in beleving en herinnering . De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2014, ISBN 978-90-234-8952-8 (Dutch).
  13. ↑ a b c Adolf Spanier. In: Familienbuch-euregio.eu. May 15, 1902, Retrieved May 25, 2018 .
  14. ^ Loe de Jong : Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog . tape 8.2 . SDU-Verlag, The Hague 1978, p. 745 .
  15. ↑ Frits Boterman: Duitse Daders. De Jodenvervolging en de Nazificatie van Nederland (1940-1945) . De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam / Antwerp 2015, ISBN 978-90-295-0486-7 , pp. 187 (Dutch).
  16. ^ Anna Hájková: The police transit camp Westerbork . In: Wolfgang Benz / Barbara Distel (eds.): Terror in the West. National Socialist camps in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg 1940–1945 (=  history of the concentration camps 1933–1945 . No. 5 ). Metropol, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-53-0 , p. 241 f .
  17. ^ Frank van Riet: De Bewakers of Westerbork . Boom, Amsterdam 2016, ISBN 978-90-5875-607-7 , pp. 269 .
  18. ↑ a b Alfred Fleßner: The common disease. ISBN 3837640620 p. 151 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  19. ↑ Eric Palmen: Albert Konrad Gemmeker, Camp Commander van Westerbork. May 4, 2019, accessed October 30, 2019 (Dutch).
  20. ^ Van Liempt, Gemmeker , p.?.
  21. ↑ Schliessers son Micha (1938-2018) grew up in Westerbork. His family survived the Holocaust. As a contemporary witness, he reported on his experiences there until old age. See Micha Schliesser, survivor of the Westerbork transit camp, visiting the Westfalen-Kolleg Dortmund . Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  22. ↑ Home on cursed earth? In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1963 ( online - July 31, 1963 ).
  23. ↑ HL van den Ende: 'Vergeet niet dat je arts bent': Joodse artsen in Nederland 1940-1945 . Uitgeverij Boom, Maastricht 2015, p. 312/319 (Dutch).
  24. ↑ Jacques Presser : Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940-1945 . tape 1 . Staatsdrukkerij / Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag 1965, p. 303 (Dutch).
  25. ^ Van Liempt, Gemmeker , o. P.
  26. ↑ HL van den Ende: 'Vergeet niet dat je arts bent': Joodse artsen in Nederland 1940-1945 . Uitgeverij Boom, Maastricht 2015, p. 317 (Dutch).
  27. ↑ De tijd: dagblad voor Nederland , November 16, 1968, p. 3
  28. ↑ The Journey of the Lost. In: josefstadt.org. September 6, 2018, accessed October 30, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Spaniard, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spaniard, Fritz Marcus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Recklinghausen
DATE OF DEATH June 16, 1967
Place of death Dusseldorf