Herbert Schemmel

Herbert Schemmel (born April 14, 1914 in Halle , † January 28, 2003 in Hamburg ) was persecuted by the Nazi regime and a camp clerk in Neuengamme concentration camp .

Life

After completing secondary school, Schemmel did vocational training at Schenker & Co. from 1929 to 1932 and then worked as an employee of the shipping company. After he refused to march with the workforce at a demonstration event on National Labor Day , his employer fired him without notice and he came into contact with the Gestapo for the first time . Months later he got a job as a travel agent at the Leipzig company Störpsch, which sold machine tools internationally and operated a wholesaler for scrap. During many business trips abroad, especially to Great Britain, he got to know the social and political conditions of other countries. This increased his rejection of the National Socialists, to which he publicly confessed.

Four weeks after the outbreak of World War II , work colleagues reported Schemmel. The Gestapo from Leipzig arrested him and stated that the reasons for his detention were that he had made statements hostile to the state and committed “disintegration within the company”. She also accused him of having illegal contacts with English companies, listening to and spreading news from foreign radio programs. Despite the acquittal of the Freiberg Special Court, the Gestapo pronounced “protective custody” and transferred Schemmel to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on March 21 . Since his file was marked with the note “permanent protective custody” and stamped “return undesirable”, Schemmel was sent to “isolation”. Due to the brutal treatment, he had a body weight of about 39 kilograms a little later and was 1.72 meters tall.

Since the camp elder Harry Naujoks had recommended him for a prisoner transport, Schemmel was transferred to the Neuengamme concentration camp, which he reached on June 30, 1940. Since he had a good knowledge of bookkeeping and spoke foreign languages, the camp management appointed him camp clerk after six months. Since he did not have to work hard physically in the office and was not exposed to the weather, he survived here until the camp was closed in April 1945. He used the knowledge he gained about the processes within the camp as far as he could to support fellow inmates.

At the end of the war, Schemmel was one of the last prisoners. He left the camp on foot and by train on a heavily guarded prisoner transport. On May 3, 1945 he was able to flee in Neumünster and hide in an allotment arbor. After the end of the war he went to Hamburg, where he settled down with his wife Ruth, who like him had survived the Neuengamme concentration camp. On July 1, 1945, he took over the management of a wholesale company for which several former prisoners worked. The British military government supported the entrepreneur in supplying camps for displaced persons with fruit and food.

At the beginning of 1950 Schemmel took over a job with the former fellow prisoner Hans-Christian Witt, who had an import and export company in the Meßberghof . Witt had been a member of the KPD since 1945 and had business partners in the GDR . During a business trip he was arrested on November 8, 1950 in the GDR on suspicion of espionage. A Soviet military tribunal in Schwerin pronounced a death sentence against him, whereupon he was shot in a prison in Moscow . Schemmel then managed the company, from 1952 as the registered owner together with his wife. At the end of the 1970s he worked for several Hamburg foreign trade companies.

Working in politics and the public

Schemmel set himself the goal of participating in the persecution and conviction of Nazi perpetrators and maintaining the culture of remembrance about the Neuengamme concentration camp. He appeared as a witness in the main Neuengamme trial and subsequent trials of the British military government. In addition, he testified in almost all West German investigations and court proceedings that were connected with the Neuengamme concentration camp. For decades he gave lectures as a contemporary witness for school classes and other events and led guided tours of the former concentration camp site.

In 1948 Schemmel co-founded the Neuengamme working group and took over its chairmanship from 1974 to 1997. As a representative of the Federal Republic of Germany, he participated in the founding of the Amicale Internationale KZ Neuengamme in Brussels in 1958 . The umbrella organization of the national camp communities elected him treasurer. Since December 1971 he worked with his wife in the SPD.

Schemmel has received several national and international awards for his commitment. These included the Polish Auschwitz Cross and the Biermann Ratjen Medal , which the Hamburg Senate awarded him in 1992.

literature

• Reimer Möller: Schemmel, Herbert . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 6 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1025-4 , p. 287-288 .