Hermann Friedrich Graben

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Hermann Friedrich Gränke (born June 19, 1900 in Graefrath (today Solingen ); died April 17, 1986 in San Francisco ) was a German resistance fighter .

Life

From 1941 the trained engineer worked as a regional manager for a Solingen construction company in the German-occupied Ukraine . In Volhynia he carried out "war-important tasks" and managed maintenance and new construction work on the track systems for the Deutsche Reichsbahn . In October 1942 he witnessed a murder by SS commandos of one of the Einsatzgruppen in Dubno , in which 3,000 people were shot in front of the city. Grabe saw how SS men with whips forced the Jews to undress. "The people had said goodbye to each other without complaints or requests for sparing". Parents still tried to cheer up their young children. Then the naked were forced to climb stairs in front of an SS man with a submachine gun into a pit in which many dead or wounded lay. They lay down in front of these people. The SS man shot her with his submachine gun. Grabe saw the "bodies twitch or the heads already lying still on the bodies in front of them." Grabe told American investigators about his terrible experience after the war. His statements were used as documents in the Nuremberg trials. Graben experienced several massacres of the Jewish population, including in Rovno .

The staunch Nazi critic succeeded in supplying thousands of Jews with forged papers and officially employing them on his construction sites. "You can't see so much bloodshed and be unaffected by it," he said later. “I had to do something. I had to protect as many people as I could. "

In the turmoil of the final months of the war, Grabe managed to save his records of the murder in the West. They enabled the Americans to track down mass graves in Ukraine and to identify those responsible. Grabe was a witness during the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946. His detailed statements made a decisive contribution to the conviction of numerous perpetrators. This had bitter consequences for him and his family. They received death threats. In addition, the experienced engineer and entrepreneur could no longer find work in post-war Germany. Nobody wanted to do business with the “ traitor to the fatherland ” and “ dirtier ”. In 1948 Grabe emigrated to California with his wife and son . In 1953 he became a US citizen.

Hermann graves tree in Yad Vashem

While Grabe was honored as one of the “ Righteous Among the Nations ” in Israel in 1965 at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial , in Germany he was again confronted with massive defamation. Georg Marschall , one of the Nazi perpetrators convicted on the basis of Gräbe's statements in Nuremberg, went on appeal in 1966 . His attorney questioned Graeb's credibility as a witness and obtained perjury charges against him. Even if the court only partially followed him, the tactic worked. Marschall was sentenced to five years in prison only for complicity in the hanging of a Jew. Grabe, on the other hand, who had also testified in the Auschwitz trial , was no longer allowed to step on German soil because he was threatened with arrest. In 1966, the " Spiegel " took over the false accusations and thus shaped the image that people in Germany made of the "liar" Graves.

His rehabilitation did not begin until the 1990s. She was not to experience graves again. He died in the United States on April 17, 1986. Wolfgang Thierse writes: "Once again the fate of Gräbes revealed how long German post-war society refused to face its responsibility." In the meantime, a Solingen youth center bears his name on the occasion of Gräbe's 100th birthday due to a resolution by all Solingen city council groups. There is a memorial plaque on the house where he was born in the Gräfrath district of Solingen. In addition, in 2016 a street in a new development area in Graefrath was named Fritz-Gränke-Straße.

literature

  • Stefan Aust ; Gerhard Spörl : The present of the past: The long shadow of the Third Reich. DVA, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05754-0 .
  • Douglas K. Huneke: Not wanted in Germany: Hermann Grabe: Biography of a Jewish Savior . Translation from the American Adrian Seifert. Epilogues Horst Sassin, Wolfgang Heuer. Jump: zu Klampen, 2016 ISBN 978-3-86674-532-2
  • Alexander Kruglov: Równe , in: Martin Dean (Ed.): The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Vol. 2, ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe: Part B . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-253-00227-3 , pp. 1459-1461

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c Wolfram Wette : Denied Heroes , Die Zeit No. 46, 2007, p. 96 (online)
  2. ↑ Christian Habbe: One against the SS. In Stefan Aust; Gerhard Spörl: The present of the past: The long shadow of the Third Reich. DVA, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05754-0 , p. 369ff.
  3. ↑ Stefan Aust: The present of the past. Munich 2004, p. 373
personal data
SURNAME Graves, Hermann Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Graves, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Gräfrath near Solingen
DATE OF DEATH April 17, 1986
Place of death San Francisco