Helmut Kleinicke

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Helmut Kleinicke (born November 19, 1907 in Wildemann , † 1979 ) was a German civil engineer , rescuer of Jews and Righteous Among the Nations .

Life

Helmut Kleinicke came from a forest ranger family and trained as a civil engineer . He was a member of the NSDAP , but resigned from the party in 1931 and re-entered in 1933 because he was unemployed. He resigned from the National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps in 1938. Kleinicke became a "war district builder" in the Krenau district (today Chrzanów ), 20 km northeast of the Auschwitz concentration camp . In Krenau he was responsible for civil engineering and structural engineering.

During his time as a war circle builder, Kleinicke ordered imprisoned Jews to do labor. He helped many of them escape. He hid them in the basement of his official apartment or in the greenhouses of the district nursery and issued them false papers so that they could leave the country. Sometimes Kleinicke drove them to the train at night by car or truck, or sometimes as far as the High Tatras .

Due to the disappearance of many forced laborers , Helmut Kleinicke was drafted into the Wehrmacht in Opole for basic training in 1943, after which he became a war participant . He suffered hearing loss in the process. After the end of the war, he spent a few months in American captivity . In 1949 he was classified as "exonerated" in the denazification process with the help of reports from those who had been rescued. With his wife Cäcilie - called Cilly - († 2007) he had a daughter Jutta and worked first in the water management office in Braunschweig , then in Koblenz. In the post-war period he repeatedly received letters from those who had been rescued. In 1964 the story of one of these rescued people appeared in the Neue Ruhr Zeitung , who explicitly looked for Kleinicke and also named his name in the article. Kleinicke had read the article, but did not answer because he feared reprisals from old Nazis. In 1979 Helmut Kleinicke died as a result of a stroke.

On January 14, 2020 Kleinicke was posthumously in the Israeli Embassy in Berlin , in the presence of Ambassador Jeremy Issacharoff , as well as the 95-year-old rescued Joseph Koenigsberg, who had been looking for him in 1964 by newspaper articles Righteous among the Nations honored. His daughter accepted the certificate and medal on behalf of her father.

Movie

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Christoph Gunkel: Judenretter Helmut Keinicke: The silent hero of Chrzanów . In: Spiegel Online . December 22, 2016 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 2, 2017]).
  2. ↑ a b Diana Zinkler: "Save my son!"
  3. ^ Christoph Gunkel: Judenretter Helmut Kleinicke "The Schindler of Chrzanów". In: Spiegel online from January 27, 2018.
  4. ^ ZDF today. A secret hero, despite NSDAP ID: How the district architect Helmut Kleinicke saved many Jews from certain death. In: facebook.com. September 12, 2017, accessed September 17, 2017 (video).
  5. ^ Christian Kirsch: The savior of Josef Königsberg. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 18, 2017 ; accessed on September 17, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Christoph Gunkel: Holocaust survivor: The search for the savior of the Jews Helmut Kleinicke . In: Spiegel Online . November 9, 2016 ( spiegel.de [accessed September 17, 2017]).
  7. ^ Peter Hartl : Late honor of a courageous life saver. In: ZDF . January 14, 2020, accessed January 14, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Kleinicke, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German civil engineer, rescuer of the Jews and Righteous Among the Nations
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Wild man
DATE OF DEATH 1979