Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen

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Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen (born September 8, 1906 in Chemnitz , Saxony , † September 21, 1945 in the NKVD camp Toszek , Poland ) was a German technician and industrialist.

family

He was born the second of four children to the Danish engineer and DKW founder Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen (1878–1964) and his German wife Johanna Clementine Therese Liebe (1884–1973). He had an older sister, Hildegard Ilse (1905–1939), and two younger brothers, Ove (1909–1995), and Arne (1912–1994).

Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen was married to Clara (1907–1985), née Cordes, known as "Clärchen". She was a daughter of Heinrich Cordes , who worked for the Foreign Office in China and later became the bank director of the German-Asian Bank in Tientsin and Beijing . The couple had five children, Sybille (* 1937), Susanne (* 1939), Hans-Peter (1940–2009), Edda (* 1941) and Maren (* 1945).

School and education

After primary school, Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen attended the reformed pedagogical Free School Community of Wickersdorf , led by Martin Luserke , until around 1925 . Then he received technical training.

Professional development

At the age of 25, Rasmussen joined the NSDAP and the NSKK in 1931 . After completing his training, in 1934, at the age of 28, he became technical director and managing partner of Framo Werke GmbH in Hainichen in Saxony, which his father founded in 1923 . Co-partners were his two younger brothers Ove and Arne and his sister Hildegard Ilse Henning, née Rasmussen.

For a long time, the Rasmussens were able to oppose the switch to armaments production, but had to switch to the production of war-essential products for the Wehrmacht by order from October 1, 1943 . As a result, Jewish forced laborers who were housed in the Hainichen camp, a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp , also came to the company . Rasmussen was led by the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production under Albert Speer as head of a special committee for grenade and smoke throwers, because u. a. these products were supposed to be manufactured by the Framo works during the final phase of the war.

Imprisonment and death

Therefore, the company of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) was considered an armaments factory after the end of the war . It was almost completely dismantled according to order 124 and transported to the Soviet Union .

Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen, acting as managing partner, was arrested by the Soviets on June 2, 1945, transported together with 1,311 other arrested persons via the district prison in Döbeln to the NKVD special camp in Bautzen , and from there by train to what is now Polish Upper Silesia , where he According to an acknowledgment of receipt from the Toszek camp of the Soviet NKVD , it arrived on July 17, 1945. This was set up on the site of the former Tost state nursing home for the mentally ill, later on the site of a fittings factory.

39-year-old Rasmussen only survived ten weeks in the detention center, which was guarded by particularly brutal guards. Harassment of the starved prisoners was the order of the day in the overcrowded camp and the hygienic conditions were catastrophic. Lt. In 1950, a former fellow prisoner issued an affidavit, Rasmussen died "in the camp hospital of general exhaustion and dysentery ." He was buried on the camp grounds. When the camp was dissolved in November 1950, more than half of the approximately 5,000 prisoners were dead.

Descendants

The pregnant wife and her four children were forced to leave their home in Hainichen two days after Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen was arrested. They had to split up and live with different neighbors. The youngest daughter was born two months after the death of their father, whom they did not learn about at the time. This was an occasion to take her to seek refuge with a sister of the wife, Antonia "Toni" Cordes (1902-1992). She practiced as a doctor in Apolda, Thuringia . The family spent the following two winters there, but the summers in a house belonging to the Rasmussen family in Zschopau Birkenweg 3. In autumn 1947 the mother brought her two oldest daughters from the Soviet occupation zone to Flensburg , where her in-laws had sought refuge in the meantime. Due to their cramped and makeshift living conditions, the two daughters first had to be housed in a children's home. The mother then moved back to her three youngest children, with whom she also set off for Flensburg a year later. The family reunited there then went to Denmark in December 1948, where the Rasmussen grandparents had retired in 1947. The children attended school there until 1953, then the young family moved to Hamburg.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen . On: mineroedder.dk
  2. ^ Immo Sievers: Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen. The life and work of the DKW founder . Delius Klasing Verlag, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-7688-1828-4 . (Family tree attached)
  3. ↑ a b c Sybille Krägel (Hamburg): Written information from the eldest daughter of Hans Werner Skafte Rasmussen from January 2, 2017.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Barbara Supp: The time of the ghosts . In: Der Spiegel, 32 (1996), August 5, 1996. On: spiegel.de
  5. ↑ a b c Michael Geiger: flashback 1923–1957 (Framo works) . On: barkas.de
  6. ^ NKVD camp in Tost / Upper Silesia (today Toszek / Poland) . On: dokst.de
  7. ^ Antonia (Toni) Cordes
personal data
SURNAME Rasmussen, Hans Werner Skafte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rasmussen, Hans Werner; Rasmussen, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Saxony
DATE OF DEATH September 21, 1945
Place of death Toszek , Poland